Of all the early neo-Kantians, Herbart has seemed the least Kantian. He appears in histories of neo-Kantianism even less than Fries and Beneke.1 And few historians of philosophy today regard Herbart as a Kantian at all. This is partly because Herbart is usually portrayed as a realist who is implacably opposed to all forms of idealism.2 But it is also partly because he is most famous for his empirical psychology, the empiricist and naturalist premises of which are completely antithetical to Kant’s transcendental psychology. For these reasons, the inclusion of Herbart in the history of neo-Kantianism might seem strange and implausible.
Yet Herbart’s non-Kantian reputation is strikingly at odds with his own self-conception. Herbart began his philosophical career as a Fichtean. But the more his philosophy moved in an independent direction, the more he began to identify with Kant, so that by the end of his career he regarded himself as a Kantian. In the preface to his 1828 Allgemeine Metaphysik he attempts to locate his philosophy in the chaos of contemporary views, and then bluntly declares: “Der Verfasser ist Kantianer.”3 And in his inaugural speech as ordinary professor in Göttingen, delivered in 1833, he makes a candid personal confession before the public: “Kantianum ipse me professus sum, atque etiam nunc profitior.”4
As sincere, blunt and open as these professions might be, they are hard to understand given Herbart’s general attitude towards Kant’s philosophy. He had been highly critical of Kant throughout his career, disputing many of Kant’s signature doctrines. When we add together these spurned doctrines, there seems little left to profess of Kant’s philosophy. Herbart had rejected these central Kantian themes: that space and time are a priori intuitions; that acts of synthesis are the origin of the unity of the manifold; that the mind is divisible into cognition, desire and taste; that there are mental faculties; that there are a priori concepts and intuitions; that reason is the source of moral obligation. And so on. If someone denies all these doctrines, someone might well ask, how can they be, in any straightforward sense, Kantian at all? Suspicions about Herbart’s Kantian declarations only grow once we note that he considered his greatest debts to be to Kant’s moral philosophy. It is difficult to understand what these debts could be, however, given that Herbart not only denies the basic premises of Kant’s moral philosophy, but that he also attempts to base ethics on aesthetics, an endeavour that Kant had famously condemned.5
Given Herbart’s highly critical attitude, and given his rejection of such central Kantian doctrines, what are we to make of his Kantian professions? We do well to let Herbart speak for himself. He provides an interesting explanation in the form of the long historical disquisition making up the first volume of his Allgemeine Metaphysik. In the preface to that work Herbart describes himself as a “Kantianer vom Jahre 1828”, meaning, in part, that he wants to keep Kantian doctrine only to the extent that it is in accord with the latest developments in the sciences. This does not mean, however, that Herbart intends to engage in a wholesale revision and modernization of Kant’s philosophy. If that were so, we would have all the more reason to be suspicious of his Kantianism. When we place Herbart’s remark in the context of his historical survey, we see that a “Kantian of 1828” means someone who continues to uphold defining Kantian doctrines against contemporary trends. This is to keep Kant abreast of the modern age because these contemporary trends happen to be, in his view, not progressive but regressive. Herbart wants to maintain these doctrines against a resurgent rationalism, which would take philosophy back to the early 18th century, back to the age of pre-critical dogmatic rationalism, which is contrary to the spirit of modern science.
There are two signature Kantian doctrines in particular that Herbart is especially eager to uphold, both of them distinctions blurred by past and present rationalism. One is the Kantian distinction between essence and existence. Kant had argued in the first Kritik that however determinate and exact our concept of a thing, we still must go beyond and outside it to know that it refers to something that exists. This distinction played a fundamental role in his critique of the rationalist tradition, Herbart notes, because it shows that reason, whose stock-in-trade is concepts, cannot demonstrate existence. Herbart then tells a long story about the history of pre-Kantian metaphysics, a story which stresses the revolutionary significance of Kant’s critique of that tradition, and which emphasizes the fundamental role of the distinction between essence and existence in that critique. Herbart very much identifies his philosophy with the Kantian Revolution, whose legacy he wants to continue. He stresses that his metaphysics upholds the crucial distinction between essence and existence, which has been blurred by the neo-rationalist metaphysics of Schelling and Hegel as much as the old rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff. Since Herbart regards the distinction between essence and existence as Kant’s great contribution and revolutionary feat, and since he appropriates it as the distinguishing feature of his own metaphysics, he thinks he is fully justified in regarding himself as a Kantian. He sees himself as the heir and torchbearer of the critical Kantian tradition, which must now continue its work into the first decades of the 19th century.
The other Kantian doctrine Herbart is so keen to uphold is the distinction between the normative and natural, between “ought” and “is” (77; Erste Anm).6 He saw this distinction as no less fundamental to Kant’s philosophy, for it was a major ambition of Kant to separate ethics from metaphysics, so that the purity and integrity of ethics would not become mired in and compromised by the dangers and disputes of metaphysics. The failure to observe this distinction, Herbart was convinced, was one of the main problems of speculative idealism. Fichte had blurred it when he made the moral law into the basic condition of the possibility of experience (167; §96); and Schelling and Hegel had confused it when they made teleology into a fundamental speculative principle of nature (80; Erste Anm). Though the normative/natural distinction was vital to Kant, Herbart believed that Kant himself was responsible for blurring it (68, 77; Erste Anm). The concept of an organism in the Kritik der Urteilskraft seemed to provide a connecting bridge between the normative and natural, the practical and theoretical. Of course, Kant had placed regulative constraints on this concept, so that we should treat nature only as if it were an organism, only as if it were purposive. But these regulative constraints were ignored by Kant’s successors, who in their reckless enthusiasm made the concept of an organism into a constitutive metaphysical principle. A true Kantian of 1828 is for Herbart someone who keeps his distance from the Kritik der Urteilskraft, and who embraces the more critical doctrines of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (73; Erste Anm). He is above all someone who refuses to revive teleology, which amounts to a relapse into the old scholastic view of nature.
Whatever the precise role of the normative/natural distinction in Kant, Herbart thought it was a crucial part of Kant’s legacy, and he made it central to his own philosophy. All the more reason, then, for regarding himself as a Kantian. Herbart’s emphasis on the Kantian distinction is indeed one of the most salient and pervasive features of his thought. He insisted on following the distinction so completely and consistently that he firmly separated metaphysics from ethics, banished teleology from his concept of nature, and denied the sacred post-Kantian tenet of the unity of theoretical and practical reason. This set Herbart apart not only from his idealist contemporaries, but also from his idealist successors, most notably Trendelenburg and Lotze, who were intent on restoring teleology. For just this reason Herbart became a formidable challenge for both those philosophers in the 1830s and 1840s.
We have now heard Herbart’s case, at least as he puts it forward in his Allgemeine Metaphysik. It should be clear that his Kantianism is a very serious declaration of allegiance to some very basic Kantian doctrines, and that it is not based on a tendentious revisionist reading of Kant, but upon a well-grounded view of Kant’s place in the history of philosophy. But it is worth noting that there was much more to Herbart’s Kantianism than his adherence to these two Kantian distinctions. His Kantianism went much deeper: it involved nothing less than his conception of philosophy itself. Herbart believed in the great importance of metaphysics to philosophy because it alone could tackle basic questions and investigate central concepts; yet he saw metaphysics as essentially a transcendental enterprise, “a science of the conceivability of experience”, “ars experientiam recti intelligendi”. Metaphysics should have nothing to do with knowledge of the absolute, as Schelling and Hegel understood it, because it should limit itself to the modest task of investigating the basic concepts and presuppositions of our experience. No less than Fries, therefore, Herbart insisted on the importance of the Kantian limitation of knowledge to experience. Metaphysics, as he understood it, should not transcend experience but investigate the conditions of its possibility.
No less decisive for Herbart’s Kantianism was his adherence to transcendental idealism.7 Admittedly, it was a somewhat revised transcendental idealism, permitting a greater degree of realism than Kant’s empirical realism. Herbart disputed the Kantian theory of space and time as a priori intuitions, and he insisted that particular spatial forms (viz. sizes and shapes) are simply given to us in experience. Nevertheless, like a good Kantian, he still maintained that the immediate objects of knowledge are representations, and that our consciousness of the world is limited to appearances. Though on different grounds than Kant, he upheld the distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances, which is so vital to transcendental idealism. Decades before Lange, Cohen or Windelband, Herbart advocated transcendental idealism as a bulwark against materialism, whose doctrines he saw as a threat to moral and religious values.
It was no accident for Herbart’s Kantian affiliations that, from 1809 to 1833, he was professor of philosophy in Königsberg. For this meant that Herbart had ascended to Kant’s throne. He would lecture in the very same buildings as Kant, using the very same lectern, and he would pass on his daily walks the very houses where Kant once lived and wrote. From this distant Prussian province Herbart, much like his great predecessor, viewed the intellectual life on the mainland with a mixture of estrangement and envy. He felt alienated from the current trends of his day, which were dominated by Schelling, Hegel and the Romantics. Like all aging philosophers, Herbart needed to define his place in history, to see where he belonged. Who better to identify with than the old sage of Königsberg himself? He lived in his city, taught in his classrooms, and occupied his chair. And so the older he became, the more Herbart saw himself as Kant’s legitimate heir, as the very incarnation of the Kantian spirit. He believed that his mission was to be a torchbearer for Kant, to preserve what was still of value for his contemporaries in the Kantian legacy. Such was the context behind his famous declaration that he was a “Kantianer von 1828”.
Our task now is a very limited one: to examine how Herbart became this Kantian.8 Alas, this is no easy task. For, unlike Fries, Herbart’s intellectual development was not stable and continuous but tumultuous and fragmented. Before he became that Kantian, he first had to settle his accounts with Fichte, and then he had to contend with the Romantic ideas of his circle of friends. By all accounts, the young Herbart was a prodigy, and everyone during his student years, including Fichte himself, saw him as the new up-and-coming star. But to realize his gifts, to get them down on paper, Herbart had to wrestle with internal monsters; he had to go through personal struggles which threatened not only his health but also his sanity. Herbart had arrived by 1809, by the time of his appointment as ordinary professor in Königsberg. But before that triumph there lay a troubled and twisted tale, which we must now proceed to tell.9
Johann Friedrich Herbart was born May 4, 1776, in Oldenburg, a prosperous town in Westphalia, near the Danish border. His social roots were upper-middle class. His grandfather, Johann Michael Herbart, worked his way up from poverty to become the headmaster of the Gymnasium in Oldenburg. His father, Thomas Gerhard Herbart, was a privy councillor and secretary to the municipal government. Because of his delicate constitution, Johann Friedrich could not withstand the rigours of the public schools, so that he had to be tutored at home. His tutor was Hermann Wilhelm Ültzen (1759–1808), a notable poet and theologian in his own right.10 It was Ültzen who first introduced Herbart to philosophy, and for whom he wrote his first philosophical essays. Ültzen was Herbart’s tutor from 1783 to 1788, after which he attended the Oldenburg Gymnasium. Philosophy was a regular part of Herbart’s early education. As some early fragments attest,11 he could write sophisticated philosophical essays even by his early teens. Among the first philosophers Herbart studied was, of course, Kant, whom, it seems, the boy took in with his mother’s milk. A curriculum vitae he wrote in 1801 tells us how “almost as a boy” (paene puer) he had “pre-tasted Wolff and Kant” (Wolfiana et Kantiana ratione praegustata).12 His valedictorian speech to his classmates, which he gave in 1793, shows a mastery of Kant’s moral philosophy.13 We know something about Herbart’s early reaction to Kant, for in 1822, he recalled the impression reading Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten had upon him some thirty years earlier.14 It was Kant, he said, who freed him from the errors of eudamonism, who taught him the value of human autonomy, and who showed him how morality is an end in itself.
After graduating from the Oldenburg Gymnasium in 1793, Herbart went to study law at the University of Jena. Like Fries, he was fortunate to be in Jena during its Wunderjahre. But, as fate would have it, he never met Fries there. Herbart was a student at Jena from October 1794 to March 1797, having left the town just before Fries’ arrival that May. His reaction to Fichte was the very opposite of Fries’. Herbart did not rush home to write refutations of Fichte’s lectures but studied his writings with religious devotion.15 Herbart knew Fichte personally, became one of his inner circle, and was a frequent guest at the Fichte household.16 He soon acquired a reputation as Fichte’s best student. We know from the testimony of Georg Rist, a close friend of Herbart, that, by the autumn of 1795, Herbart was a convinced Fichtean, and so much so that he would try to convert friends to the new gospel. Rist describes how, one fine afternoon that autumn, he had a long conversation with Herbart, who persuaded him that his own pantheistic fatalism was untenable because the entire natural world was only “a dream in his own soul”.17 Since Rist found this conclusion disturbing, Herbart tried to reassure him by providing daily tutorials on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.
Shortly after his arrival in Jena, Herbart became a member of the Gesellschaft der freien Männer,18 the fraternity of Fichte students who banded together to discuss philosophy and literature. It was the custom of this society to hold fortnightly meetings to discuss members’ philosophical essays.19 Herbart’s comments on one of Rist’s papers in the autumn of 1796 reveal his Fichtean ruminations.20 Kant’s great question “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” expresses, Herbart writes, “the need of reason for synthesis”. All our attempts to acquire knowledge, and all our goals for action, involve the striving for synthesis. “What is the purest concept of synthesis?”, Herbart asks. His answer is pure Fichte: the ego (6). The ego is an act of self-knowledge, which consists in pure synthesis because it involves a moment of both identity and difference: identity, insofar as the subject and object of self-knowledge are one and the same; and difference, insofar as there is a distinction between the self as knowing subject and the self as knowing object. The question then arises: How this synthesis is possible? Or, more specifically, how is self-knowledge possible? There is an infinite regress in self-knowledge, Herbart argues, because the self-knowing subject cannot know itself as subject but only as object; every attempt to know itself as subject makes it into an object, so that the subject remains forever out of view. It is the task of science, Herbart says, to resolve this problem and to explain the possibility of self-knowledge (7–8). Much of Herbart’s early reflections on the Wissenschaftslehre will be preoccupied with this issue.
Though he much admired Fichte, Herbart’s devotion to him was never unconditional or uncritical. Even before the autumn of 1796 doubts emerge. On July 1 he wrote his friend Johann Smidt that he would have to write his own Wissenschaftslehre because not a single page of Fichte’s book was “a pure gain for truth.”21 Then, on July 30, he told Smidt that his philosophy was now moving in an independent direction, and that he had misgivings about Fichte’s philosophy of freedom.22 As the months passed, so his qualms grew. In September 1796 he informed Smidt that he was now formulating his own theory of space because Fichte’s deduction of it was too abstract.23 And in December he revealed that his departures from Fichte’s exposition of the Wissenschaftslehre were significant because Fichte’s version was so vague and unmethodological.24 Although he felt that Fichte had many good ideas in his Naturrecht, he was also convinced that his deductions of these ideas are false.
Unfortunately, Herbart does not go into detail in these letters, so we do not know much about the precise reasons for his growing doubts. For his Jena years there are only two surviving manuscripts about Fichte,25 and only one of them sheds some light on his critical reaction to his master’s teaching. This manuscript, dating from 1794, consists of some questions about Fichte’s Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre.26 The questions are of the greatest importance, however, because they concern the viability of Fichte’s foundationalist programme. It was Fichte’s great ambition to base transcendental philosophy on a single first principle, namely, the principle that “the ego posits absolutely its own being.”27 Herbart asks the difficult and important question: How can Fichte’s self-positing ego posit the non-ego if that non-ego is something opposed to itself? If it is the nature of the ego to be purely self-positing, as Fichte so often insists, how does it negate itself and limit itself by something that it is not? In short: How from something purely self-positing and self-affirming do we get something self-oppositing and self-negating? The Wissenschaftslehre thus begins with an irresolvable paradox. At the very least it seems as if Fichte’s first principle cannot explain the opposition between subject and object, the most basic structural feature of ordinary experience.
We know about Herbart’s early critical reaction to speculative idealism more from his response to some of Schelling’s first writings. Starting in 1796 Herbart began to read and comment critically on Schelling’s early works, specifically his Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794) and Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795). Why the focus on Schelling rather than Fichte? Herbart told Smidt that he discussed Schelling’s philosophy because it is the most consistent form of Fichte’s idealism.28 Perhaps too Herbart did not want to criticize his teacher directly? And perhaps he saw Schelling as a rival within Fichte’s inner circle? In any case, he took Schelling very seriously and examined his work with great care and precision. There are three essays on Schelling, none of which were published, all of which are dense, crude and fragmentary. Still, they deserve scrutiny because they are revealing documents about Herbart’s early attitude towards speculative idealism, and because they laid the ground for his later reaction against it.
The first essay is a brief comparison of Schelling with Spinoza.29 It is very complimentary to Schelling, whose work is regarded as the idealist antithesis to Spinoza’s realism and naturalism. Yet Herbart cannot resist raising two critical questions about Schelling’s system. The first is the same he had once posed against Fichte: How does the absolute ego oppose itself to a non-ego? This struggle seems to be an imaginary one with a “self-created enemy”. The second poses a new problem: How can Schelling have an intellectual intuition of the absolute ego when he admits that it is not his own personal empirical ego? How does he raise himself above his empirical and personal limitations to grasp an ego that is neither empirical nor personal? Both questions went to the heart of the foundationalist programme. The first asks whether the idealist’s deduction is coherent, and whether it has any real explanatory value at all. The second asks for the epistemic warrant for such a first principle. No less than Fries, Herbart was sceptical of the claims made on behalf of intellectual intuition, which he likens to a mystical experience.
The second essay is a critical commentary on Schelling’s Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt.30 Schelling’s tract was a manifesto for Fichte’s foundationalist programme, an argument for the necessity of founding philosophy on the basis of a single self-evident first principle.31 There must be one first principle, Schelling argued, because if there were two such principles, there would have to be some higher synthesis of them, which would then be the first principle. But Herbart could see no a priori reason for assuming that there is a higher principle, for what if the principles have very distinct content? (13). Schelling had placed a very high demand upon his first principle, which should provide not only the form but also the content of his system. Yet such a demand, Herbart argues, simply cannot be fulfilled. If the first principle cannot derive the existence of the non-ego, it has even less power to deduce the variety of the content of sensation (14). The main problem with Schelling’s programme, Herbart explains, is that he confuses “the concept of the absolute” with “the infinite” (14). Though his language is obscure, Herbart’s main point seems compelling. While the concept of the absolute is the idea of the whole, the infinite consists in its many distinct parts. Just having the concept of the whole, Herbart is saying, does not by itself give us all its parts. This concept abstracts from the individual characters of the many parts, and for just this reason cannot deduce them.
Herbart’s final essay is a detailed examination of Schelling’s Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie.32 Its central critical theme is Schelling’s problematic inference from the first grounds of human knowledge to the first grounds of being itself. Schelling finds the first ground of human knowledge, its unconditional first principle, in the ego, and more specifically in the principle “I am”. This principle is unconditional in the sense that it is self-evident and does not presuppose any higher principle. Thus “I am” is true whenever I affirm it; and even if I were to deny it I would still affirm it, because I have to be to deny it. Granting this point, however, gives us no reason to infer that the “I” is the first principle of being itself. Just because the proposition “I am” is unconditioned in an epistemic sense, does not mean that the “I” to which it refers, the ego itself, is unconditioned in an ontological sense, that is, that it is causi sui and depends on nothing else to exist. Schelling makes a leap from the ratio cognoscendi to the ratio essendi, from the grounds of our knowing something to the grounds of its being, confusing the unconditionality of thinking about an object with the unconditionality of the object itself (20). Although there is perhaps a deeper philosophical reason for assuming that thinking and being are ultimately the same, Schelling does not provide such a reason and seems simply to confuse them (18). For Herbart, it seems more plausible to assume that there is a basic distinction between the ego and reality:
Absolute being is pure rest; it is the silence over the surface of the sea completely at rest; no one should dare to disturb this surface with the smallest circles. The ego is exactly the opposite: a vortex striving outward and inward. Rest would be the death of the ego, activity is its only being. (23)
Herbart finds another glaring fault with Schelling’s work: it is dogmatic, transcending the limits of possible experience. While Schelling abjures traditional metaphysics because it transcends these limits, he is guilty of the same sin. For his absolute ego, as the condition of all empirical consciousness, does not fall within empirical consciousness itself (26). The more we reflect on the status of Schelling’s absolute ego, the more it becomes clear that it is beyond all finite experience, and that it is nothing less than Spinoza’s single infinite substance, the first principle of all dogmatism (27).
Though Herbart never refers to Kant in these early essays, he might as well have done so, because there are Kantian leitmotifs throughout. All the problems that Kant found with dogmatic metaphysics in the 1760s Herbart now discovers in speculative idealism in the 1790s. Fichte and Schelling, despite their pretensions to criticism, lapse into the same old fallacies as Leibniz and Wolff. Again and again in these early essays, Herbart applies the lessons of Kant’s “Transcendental Dialectic”: that we must stay within the limits of possible experience; that we should not hypostasize thinking about being; that we must not search for a material criterion of truth; that a priori principles are entirely formal; that we human beings do not possess an intellectual intuition.
Already in Jena, almost simultaneously with Fries, Herbart had discovered some of the same problems with speculative idealism and its foundationalist programme. However, his reaction to these problems was very different from Fries. While Fries regarded these problems as fatal, as reason for rejecting Fichte’s philosophy and programme, Herbart believed that they were reason for revising that philosophy and placing it on a better foundation. Just what that new foundation and exposition should be Herbart still did not know; it would be the object of intensive search in the years to come. While Fries was hostile to Fichte from the start, Herbart had to contend with a man who had been his teacher and benefactor. Gratitude alone would make his reckoning with Fichte more difficult. It was only after a much longer inner struggle that Herbart would finally be able to liberate himself from Fichte’s influence. We will now consider the crucial episodes in that struggle.
The young men who formed Die Gesellschaft der freien Männer saw themselves as leaders in the new order of things, as foreseen by Fichte. It was their goal to move mankind forward towards a new state and society founded on the ideals of liberty and equality. The task of the Fichtean intellectual was to explain these ideals to the people and to show them how they should be realized.33 The path forward did not lie with revolution, however, but through gradual reform, especially through the education of the people. The people would be able to understand and appreciate the ideals of liberty and equality, and they would be willing and able to act on them, only if they were properly prepared through education. So, before the new social and political order, there had to be the new man, which could be created only through education. With such reasoning in mind, many of the “free men” resolved to be Hauslehrer, which was not only the most practical means to realize their ideals but also the best way for them to earn a living.
The young Fichteans decided that the best place to realize their ideals was in Switzerland, the land of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Pestalozzi, the greatest educational theorists of the 18th century. They were probably encouraged to go there by Fichte, who had lived in Switzerland in the early 1790s, and who had met Pestalozzi, whose educational experiments profoundly impressed him.34 Two of the free men, Johann Rudolf Steck and Johann Rudolf Fischer, were already from Switzerland and so could help organize affairs there. In 1796 two more Fichteans, August Ludwig Hülsen and Johann Erich von Berger, went to Switzerland to scout and assess the situation there. They began to encourage others to come, so that by the summer of 1797 twelve members of the society had emigrated to Helvetia. Not the least among them was Herbart himself, who travelled in a “caravan” with five other Fichteans to Berne in March 1796.
The night before the caravan embarked, they were to be fêted by Fichte and his wife.35 The excited travellers were expecting to be sent off with a bash, a hearty celebration; but they were terribly disappointed when Fichte greeted them with reserve and served them “sour punch”. Surely, this was no way to say goodbye to his dearest students! But a closer knowledge of the circumstances allows us to excuse Fichte’s glumness: having already enjoyed an earlier bash, his guests arrived at midnight and left at four in the morning! In the final moment he did muster the energy to rise to the occasion: he become emotional, sorry to see the departure of his devoted students.
While still in Jena, Herbart had entered a contract with an aristocratic family in Berne to serve as a tutor to their three children. The head of the family, C.F. von Steiger, was the governor of the province of Interlaken. As fate would have it, Herbart’s predecessor in this role was no less than Hegel, who had been tutor to the von Steiger family from 1793 to 1796.36 While Hegel’s time with the von Steiger family had been fraught with tension and mistrust, Herbart had a more rewarding experience. On the whole, he felt at home there, enjoying the confidence of von Steiger and the affection of his children.37 Wisely, Herbart had negotiated that the position would leave him sufficient leisure to pursue his own studies. One of the reasons he chose to be a house tutor is that he believed it offered him more independence than other careers. Such independence, he believed, would give him the time necessary to prepare for an academic career.
The most important event in Herbart’s intellectual development in his Swiss years (1796–1800) was his encounter with Pestalozzi, who became the most powerful influence on his philosophy of education. The first meeting was probably arranged through Fichte, who would have recommended Herbart to Pestalozzi. Apparently, Pestalozzi was as impressed with Herbart as he was with Pestalozzi. A series of mutual visits took place. Pestalozzi would come to Berne to see Herbart, and Herbart would go to Burgdorf to see Pestalozzi. It is not difficult to understand the attraction Pestalozzi’s ideas would have for a young Fichtean philosopher. Pestalozzi’s method of education stressed the natural development and independence of the child, which seemed the best means of creating the new Fichtean man, whose ideal was complete autonomy. Pestalozzi’s method would attempt to awaken the senses and feelings of the child, letting it discover things for itself through its own experience and reflection rather than relying on abstract lessons prepared for it. It discouraged the rote learning, emphasis on languages and severe discipline of traditional education, which seemed to place so many constraints on the child’s natural development and autonomy. Thanks to the inspiration of Pestalozzi, Herbart would devote much of his career to the philosophy of education and he would eventually engage in several educational experiments of his own. He became the chief spokesman for Pestalozzis’ ideas in Germany. It was in this role that Herbart first became known in his homeland.
Although educational theory and practice was a major concern of Herbart in his Swiss years, he continued to think about philosophy. He wrote his family friend Gerhard Anton von Halem in January 1798 that, despite the distractions of nature and work, his need for doing philosophy remained as pressing as ever.38 There are, however, only two short philosophical fragments from the Berne period, ‘Über philosophisches Wissen und philosophisches Studium’ and ‘Erster problematischer Entwurf der Wissenslehre’, which were both written in 1798.39 It is often said that Herbart conceived his later system of philosophy during his Swiss years.40 But there is little in these fragments that indicates the direction of his future philosophy. The first, which was probably written for Die Gesellschaft der freien Männer, provides some general advice for pursuing philosophy. Herbart recommends thinking for oneself, avoiding eclecticism and reliance on authority; he also encourages thinking experimentally and rigorously, following an idea to its end wherever it might lead, and not letting a train of thought be interrupted by pet ideas. The second fragment contains Fichtean reflections on the theme of self-consciousness. It continues Herbart’s earlier reflections on synthetic unity, the problem of how self-consciousness is possible if the subject and object must be the same and different. Herbart now ponders the conditions of the unity of apperception, that is, how there can be a single self-consciousness throughout a manifold of distinct perceptions. Nowhere in this fragment, however, do we find Herbart taking issue with Fichte. Indeed, Herbart’s argument is very similar to that of Fichte in the third part of his Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Like Fichte, Herbart finds the solution to the problem of synthetic unity in the concept of an infinite striving. Despite his many doubts about Fichte, this fragment shows that Herbart was still following a Fichtean agenda, that he was still thinking about Fichtean problems, and that he was still trying to solve them according to a Fichtean method. His aim is still that of the Jena years: to rewrite the Wissenschaftslehre, not to overthrow it.
The thesis that Herbart developed, the germ of his later philosophy in Switzerland, ultimately goes back to Herbart himself. In 1798 he was confident that his thinking was moving in a new direction, and that some of his ideas would prove fruitful. This is clear from his January letter to von Halem:
Neither nature nor the work that I have found here silence the need for the philosophy I seek, and for which I believe I have found a starting point … I fancy it is a good omen for my idea of the science of knowledge that in every way it continues to urge itself upon me. I confess that Fichte’s previous performances are conspicuous only by their contrast with the ideal.41
He was even more self-confident when he wrote his parents six months later:
The wealth of my present thoughts consists in some that seem to contain the germ of many others. I acquired them in the past two and a half years … But thoughts either produce new ones or they grow old and disappear. Now an inner certainty elevates me above the systems of our time, the Kantian and Fichtean not excepted; and even if I should be in error, I hold it to be a great fortune, without fear or the need for a leader, to be able to wander through a field that appears to grow larger with every step.42
But what were these ideas that Herbart was forging, the thoughts that gave him such confidence that he stood above the systems of his age? Unfortunately, Herbart does not explain and reveals nothing. Perhaps he had only vague intuitions, which he still had not been able to work out in any detail? Perhaps, after writing these letters, he tried to develop them but rejected them on further reflection? A remarkable letter from October 1798 to his friend Friedrich Muhrbeck in Paris shows that he was still not ready to write a system and that he was only collecting the materials for one:
Had I known six years ago what I now know, a philosophical system would have grown from it in a few months–at least as an experiment (Probe). Now I only look around for the tools to lift the heavy stones, [viz.] analysis of the infinite, experience with people and children, and that kind of thing.43
This tentative attitude appears more explicitly and emphatically only a month later in a letter to Rist,44 in which Herbart responds to the rumour among his friends that he had created his own system of philosophy. In November 1798 Johann von Böhlendorff, a friend of the society, wrote a letter to Rist with the exciting news: “Herbart has now found his own system.”45 Böhlendorff said that Herbart had gone into isolation in the forest near Engisstein for several weeks, and that he came out of it with a draft for his own system. It was a new kind of system, Böhlendorff said, one going beyond anything in Reinhold, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Böhlendorff was probably referring to the manuscript ‘Erster problematischer Entwurf der Wissenslehre’, which was indeed written in Engisstein in 1798. But that fragment, as we have seen, contains nothing new and is only an exploration and reformulation of standard Fichtean themes. More tellingly, Herbart himself felt obliged to correct Böhlendorff’s enthusiasm. In his letter to Rist he declared that he had no such system, and that he only had some provisional ideas for one. All he would claim for his ideas is that they seemed worth considering, or at least that he had still not found out what is wrong with them; but he told Rist that he did not regard them as important enough to bother explaining them.
The tentative attitude apparent from the letters to Muhrbeck and Rist show that Herbart was still far from having worked out his own system of philosophy during his Swiss years. Rather than breaking with the Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre, Herbart was still thinking in its shadow. He wanted a new exposition of the Wissenschaftslehre, one that would make clear its real foundation, but not a new philosophy or doctrine. As we have seen, this was a project he had already conceived in his Jena years. In the final analysis, then, the Swiss years were a period of consolidation, not even one of transition, let alone gestation.
Yet in one important respect Herbart was moving in an independent direction during the Swiss years: namely, in his personal attitude towards Fichte. Though he was still thinking with Fichtean methods and on Fichtean problems, Herbart felt himself less and less bound to the sway of his former teacher. Thus he told Muhrbeck in his October letter that “Fichte’s fairy palace” was no longer habitable for him.46 A spat with Fichte in early 1799 had also hastened the unravelling of their relationship. Apparently, Herbart wrote to Fichte that he wished to take issue with his latest work, his Appellation an das Publikum,47 and that Fichte had taken offense, scolding Herbart like a schoolmaster.48 Herbart in turn was offended by Fichte’s attitude.49 This step towards personal independence will ultimately lead to a much greater intellectual independence, whose results we will soon see.
The most formidable force in Herbart’s intellectual development was neither Pestalozzi nor Fichte, not even Kant. It was his mother. Lucie Margarete Herbart (née Schütte) was a well-educated and, by all accounts, formidable woman. She directed Herbart’s education at every stage, from infancy to adulthood, from cradle to university. His education was her life’s purpose. She had become alienated from her husband from the early days of their marriage, and she feared losing the affection of her only child. And so after his Gymnasium years Lucie Margarete followed her son to Jena, where she lived by his side for years and joined in university life. ‘Madame Herbart’ became part of the circle of Herbart’s friends, some of whom she enlisted to serve as spies on the activities of her son. She was also a common guest in the Fichte household, where, on one memorable occasion, she cornered Fichte on his views about woman and marriage.50 She eventually made Fichte her confidant, revealing to him her deepest feelings of despair before her divorce.51
Lucie Margarete gave her blessings to her son’s journey to Switzerland. She very much liked the idea that her son would be teaching the children of a Swiss aristocrat. She did not share, however, her son’s plans for a long stay there, least of all his hopes to prepare for a professorship. Convinced that philosophy is no career prospect, she had better ideas for her son. He was to accompany a prince from Oldenburg on his journey around Germany, and for his services he would receive a position in the local government. Herbart firmly resisted his mother’s plans,52 though only for a while. She later claimed to be so ill that she needed her son to care for her and the family business in Oldenburg.53 With reluctance, Herbart resigned his post in Berne and returned to Germany in early 1800. Upon his arrival in Oldenburg he made a dramatic and traumatic discovery: that his mother was not so ill after all, and that she had called him home partly to realize her plans for him, and partly to use him in messy divorce proceedings.54 Not surprisingly, this turn of events led to a breach in relations. Having overstepped her limits, Lucie Margarete had achieved what she most feared: the alienation of her only child.
Herbart now found himself back in Germany, estranged from mother and family, with neither work nor income. Having resigned his post in Berne, there was no going back to Switzerland, though he felt he really belonged there. In despair and distress he fell back on the one source of support that he had cultivated over the years: his circle of close friends. For the next two years Herbart lived with friends in Bremen and in Smidt’s estate outside the city. Though the breach with his mother had ruined his nerves and sapped his health, Herbart continued to work on philosophy, classical scholarship and mathematics. He later described his Bremen years as “voll Arbeit und Schmerz.” Yet his pains were worth it. They bore great fruit. For the Bremen years mark the onset of Herbart’s intellectual independence.
This new independence manifests itself in a more critical attitude towards Fichte, which first appears in a short manuscript that Herbart wrote in Lilienthal at the end of May 1800, ‘Zur Kritik der Ichvorstellung’.55 Herbart now begins to question Fichte’s central and characteristic concept, the ego or self. He raises the question: What have we gained with all Fichte’s reasoning about the ego? Was it only so much vain and delusory labour? And the answer now, of course, is a firm “yes”. Herbart is now telling himself that he was wasting his energy in Enggistein in trying to think through the logic of this concept. What is wrong with it? Simply put, it is self-contradictory. Fichte maintains that the ego is pure subject–object identity, that in the ego being and thinking are one and the same. But the trouble is that Fichte also concedes that thinking in actu cannot be thought through this very act. So he is therefore saying both that: 1) thinking of being and being are one and the same; and 2) thinking of being cannot be the being thought of, because it cannot be thought through this very act (114). Herbart summarizes the absurdity of the idea: “The being of thinking is the reality of thinking—real thinking, the act of thinking. But it is just that which cannot be thought.—Therefore, an intelligence [i.e. a rational being or person] thinks of a thinking, it thinks of exactly that of which it cannot think–[which is to say] that it thinks nonsense.” (114). With that, Herbart discards the concept that had troubled him since the mid-1790s. It is striking, however, that in this fragment he discovers no new problem in Fichte’s concept, none that he had not already articulated in Jena and Berne. But now the problem is no longer a challenge to be solved; it has turned into an overwhelming objection. Herbart had simply decided not to try to save Fichte any longer.
Another sign of an important change in the Bremen years appears in some popular lectures Herbart gave in the Bremen Museum in 1800.56 Nowhere in these lectures does Herbart explicitly take issue with Fichte; but his treatment of his main theme implies a break with Fichte’s ethical idealism. Herbart’s theme is the relationship between morality and religion. What role does each play in our lives? And what are the boundaries between them? Herbart draws a simple and basic distinction between morality and religion, so that one does not trespass into the realm of the other. Morality deals with human actions and decisions, with the world insofar as we can change it according to our will. Religion, however, concerns human feelings, involving an awareness of the world as it is given to us and lies beyond our control. While morality considers the human being in activity, insofar as it strives to change its world, religion treats the human being at rest, insofar as it is at peace with its world. In these lectures Herbart’s conception of morality is decidedly Fichtean: that we create ourselves through an act of will. As he puts it: “everyone must posit himself, not as he finds himself but in what he demands of himself” (118). But the striking point is that Herbart sets limits to the realm of morality. Moral striving should not be so consuming that we lose ourselves in our actions, that we fail to see the world around us (120). There cannot be a morality for the human being at peace, Herbart argues, because peace deals with feelings, which cannot be created or commanded (123). In setting these boundaries to the realm of morality, Herbart was taking silent issue with Fichte’s ethical idealism. For it was a central doctrine of that idealism, as Fichte expounded it in his Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre and in his Bestimmung des Gelehrten, that there should be no limit to the striving of the human will, that the will should forever struggle and aspire to subdue all of nature, so that it is the product of its activity alone. Although Fichte believed that this striving would be infinite, that it could at best only approximate its goal, the ideal was still to overcome completely the otherness of the realm of nature, to break down even our physical and sensible natures, so that, in the end, all human beings would become a single infinite rational being, namely, God. Rather than striving to become the divine, Herbart is recommending that we rest and try to find it in the realm of nature outside us.
This shift in attitude away from Fichte’s ethical idealism also appears in Herbart’s pedagogical writings from the Bremen years. These writings, some of Herbart’s first publications, were attempts to introduce Pestalozzi’s ideas into Germany.57 We learn right away from the first of them, ‘Über Pestalozzi’s neueste Schrift: Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder Lehrte’, that the central point of education is to teach the child how to be aware of the world around it. We should not cultivate the child’s imagination, nor train its intellect, to the point where it ceases to be sensitive and responsive to the world. Before we fantasize about another world, and before we talk about this one, we must first learn to see things. We must learn to develop what Herbart calls our power of intuition (Anschauung), that is, the capacity to perceive things accurately, just as they are given to us, and without trying to control them. The ultimate goal of Pestalozzi’s education, as Herbart puts it, is to develop “aesthetic perception” (139, 150). It is only when we develop this capacity, he argues, that we acquire “subtlety of feeling, a wider field of vision, a richer fantasy and deeper investigative insight” (150). In another writing, the treatise Pestalozzis Idee eines ABC der Anschauung, Herbart further explains that seeing is an art, and that like all art, it has to go through a series of exercises to be developed (155). We can divide the powers of the child into desire, fantasy and observation, and that to which we should give the greatest weight in education is observation. Why? Because cultivating desire and fantasy gives way to moods and whims, as Rousseau warned, while only observation teaches us a more realistic attitude, how things are and why they must be that way. Fantasy needs direction, desire needs a counterweight, and both are found in the power of observation, which shows us how things must be.
We need not go into further detail here about Herbart’s ideal of education, which has been discussed extensively by others.58 The point worth stressing here is that Herbart’s ideal demands developing a completely different side of human nature than that stressed by Fichte. The goal of education is not to develop the titanic Fichtean will, which knows no limits and which would make all the world obey its commands; rather, it is to cultivate a capacity of aesthetic perception that recognizes our limits and grasps the necessity inherent in things. Rather than attempting to make nature bow to our rational commands, we now learn to see that it has its own inherent value and order. Applying Herbart’s earlier distinction between morality and religion to his pedagogical views, it should be clear that his ideal of education attempts to develop the religious side of our nature, our capacity for feeling rather than for acting.
Herbart’s move away from Fichte’s ethical idealism in Bremen is not surprising or mysterious but only in keeping with the spirit of his age. Already in the late 1790s several members of the Romantic circle in Jena (Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, Hölderlin), and several friends of the Gesellschaft der freien Männer in Switzerland (von Berger, Hülsen), had begun to react against Fichte’s ethical idealism and to move towards an organic naturalism.59 Rather than seeing nature in negative terms, as the non-ego, as an obstacle to be overcome in the infinite ethical striving of the ego, they saw it in more positive terms as an organic whole, as a living being in its own right. They ceased to regard the ego as a purely intellectual being independent of nature and having the power and mission to dominate it; instead, they now viewed the ego as only one being in nature, as a product and expression of its laws. This organic naturalism went hand-in-hand with an aesthetic vision of the world: the whole of nature, as an organic unity, is akin to a work of art. Rather than striving to make it conform to our ends, the vocation of man is now to understand nature in her own terms, to treat her as an end in herself and to grasp her as if she were a work of art by a cosmic creator. To understand nature in her own terms is to perceive her as a work of art. This new emphasis on aesthetic perception was often expressed in terms of a power of intuition or feeling.60
All these ideas begin to appear in the early 1800s in some of Herbart’s Bremen writings. Not surprisingly, Herbart was moving in the direction of his fellow friends and Romantic contemporaries. In short, he was a Johnnie-come-lately to the Romantic movement, and it had only been his extraordinarily close relationship with Fichte that had kept him from jumping into the Romantic stream earlier. Now that he had liberated himself from Fichte in his final Berne days, he was now ready to test the Romantic waters.
In Bremen Herbart sometimes did more than test the waters: he dived into them. He not only voiced Romantic themes but he embraced the Romantic worldview. Such is the upshot of an extraordinary essay that Herbart wrote probably in his Bremen days, ‘Ueber die ästhetische Darstellung der Welt, als das Hauptgeschäfft der Erziehung’, which he appended to the second edition of his Pestalozzis Idee einer ABC der Anschauung.61 Here we find Herbart, flatly contrary to Fichtean dogma, embracing two central Romantic themes: the primacy of the aesthetic dimension of life and organic naturalism. The first theme emerges in the course of defending his thesis that the chief business of education is the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility. The question arises of the place of morality in this conception of education. Surely, a chief purpose of education is to develop moral character; but the cultivation of aesthetic powers seems to have only an accidental connection with that morality. Herbart’s response to this difficulty is remarkable: he argues that morality, properly seen, is an aesthetic capacity, that moral judgement is ultimately subordinate to aesthetic judgement. He comes to this conclusion through an analysis of the concept of morality itself. Herbart maintains that the fundamental characteristic of morality consists in obedience, the acceptance of an obligation that binds the will. The source of obligation cannot lie in a practical capacity, the power of the will, because the will is bound by the law and has no power to change it. It also cannot lie in a theoretical capacity, because it is the business of theoretical reason to determine laws about what must be the case, whereas the will is bound by an ought, not a must. What, then, can be the source of obligation if it is not practical or theoretical? It can only be aesthetic. The source of moral obligation ultimately arises from a capacity of aesthetic judgement, which consists in perceiving the proper relations between things and judging their worth or value. Herbart sees aesthetic judgement as a power of reason, which is for him less a power of reasoning or inference than one of perceiving and judging. He calls it Vernehmen, an intranslatable term, which has connotations of perception and judgement, both of which are fully intended.
The second Romantic theme, organic naturalism, surfaces when Herbart questions the concept of the freedom of the will in “the latest moral system”, an unmistakable allusion to Fichte’s ethics. If we assume that the purpose of education is to foster morality, he argues, this concept undermines that purpose. According to this system, freedom is a purely intellectual or noumenal power, which is independent of the sensible and phenomenal world. This power therefore becomes inaccessible to the educator, whose means and influence fall entirely into the sensible and phenomenal world. For the educator, morality is an event, a natural occurrence, which takes place in the mind of the pupil; it is for this reason alone that he thinks that he has the power to stimulate and encourage morality in the young. All that takes place according to education happens of necessity, Herbart insists. The realistic standpoint of the educator does not permit, therefore, any interference from the idealistic standpoint: “Not the softest wind of transcendental freedom, not through the slightest crack, can blow into the domain of the educator.” (261). Herbart notes that the advocate of this moral system will try to explain away the educator’s influence over his pupil by dismissing it as just another event in the empirical world (260–261). But Herbart does not to give any weight to this attempt to escape the objection. His general view is that each person, though unique and individual, is still only one part of nature, whose necessity expresses itself through him (272).
By 1802, then, at the end of his Bremen days, Herbart had made enormous strides in escaping from his Fichtean heritage. He no longer accepted Fichte’s ethical idealism, his concept of the ego, his view of nature, or his idea of transcendental freedom. In rejecting these Fichtean doctrines Herbart drew sustenance and spirit from the budding Romantic movement. Herbart the Fichtean had now become Herbart the Romantic. Yet, as we shall soon see, Herbart’s Romantic days were very brief. There were weighty forces within him restraining his Romantic tendencies, forces that came from one powerful source and influence: Immanuel Kant.
In May 1802 Herbart found himself in Göttingen. His immediate reason for being there was to be a Hauslehrer for the son of a Hannoverian minister, Graf von Grote; but moving there also brought him closer to his ultimate goal: a post in a university.62 Shortly after his arrival in Göttingen, Herbart registered to undergo the necessary examinations for both his doctorate and habilitation.63 For these, he had to undertake two public disputations, one for the doctorate and another for the habilitation. The disputations, which took place on two consecutive days, October 22 and 23, 1802, required that he defend ten or twelve theses.64 We know little or nothing about the reasoning behind these theses, still less what Herbart actually said during the disputation. The theses are simple Latin sentences that baldly state the proposition to be discussed.65 They are remarkable, however, for revealing the sceptical and critical direction of Herbart’s thinking at this time. Some of the theses target traditional metaphysics. The doctoral theses state that metaphysics cannot form a complete whole (III), and that it is doubtful whether there is a single first principle to derive all metaphysical truths (IV), while the habilitation theses declare that the concepts of absolute necessity and perfection of traditional theology are absurd or empty (I, II). This sceptical spirit also applies against ethics and practical philosophy. For one doctoral thesis maintains that natural law, separated from ethics and politics, is a nullity (X), whereas two habilitation theses proclaim that there is no general theory of the ideal state (VIII) and that a theory of punishment is impossible (IX). More significantly, Herbart is very critical of transcendental philosophy, in both its Kantian and Fichtean versions. Three doctoral theses blast transcendental freedom, declaring that the very concept is void (VII), that it is not necessary for ethics (VIII), and that even if it existed we could never be aware of it (IX). Another habilitation thesis disputes Kant’s argument in the Transcendental Aesthetic: simply because space and time are necessary for our knowledge does not prove that they are innate (V). Two more habilitation theses attack Fichte’s idealism: one declares intellectual intuition a nullity (VI), while another pronounces the ego to be self-contradictory (VII).
The disputation theses show how far Herbart had moved away from the Kantian-Fichtean idealism of his youth. Now he had greater critical distance than ever before on central doctrines of transcendental idealism. For some scholars, the theses show that Herbart now had his own independent philosophy that he conceived in opposition to transcendental philosophy.66 We must be careful, however, to put the disputation theses in proper perspective. While Herbart will continue to be critical of all these aspects of transcendental philosophy—Fichte’s concepts of freedom, the ego and intellectual intuition, and Kant’s reasoning in the Transcendental Aesthetic—he does not reject transcendental idealism entirely. Indeed, he refuses to abandon it for the sake of empiricism, naturalism and realism. In the following Göttingen years he will develop his own metaphysics, some of whose central tenets he will describe as transcendental idealism. True to that doctrine, Herbart will maintain that the immediate objects of cognition are only representations, and that all that we know through them are appearances.
Herbart passed his doctoral and habilitation exams with flying colours. He was indeed the first candidate to satisfy the university’s new stringent requirements, which stipulated that a Dozent should supply not only a dissertation but also take both doctoral and habilitation exams.67 Since Herbart had the reputation of being a Fichtean, some of the old guard at Göttingen were wary of admitting an idealist in their ranks; but Herbart’s criticisms of idealism would surely have dispelled their doubts on that score. For the next two years, 1802–1804, Herbart lectured as a Privatdozent on metaphysics, introduction to philosophy and pedagogics. He was by all accounts a popular and effective lecturer, enjoying close rapport with his students.
Such was Herbart’s reputation that in 1804 the University of Heidelberg contacted him to see if he had any interest in a new philosophy position there. The Heidelberg authorities had already considered Fries with regard to the same position, though they soon lost interest when they heard about his teaching record. In February 1805 Herbart duly received an attractive offer from Heidelberg: a full ordinary professorship and 1000 Gulden salary. He declined, however, after Göttingen made an attractive counter-offer. Herbart felt at home in Göttingen, having acquired a good reputation there and a close circle of students. The position in Heidelberg eventually went to Fries after all.
Having been promoted to professor in Göttingen, Herbart, following academic custom, was obliged to give an inaugural lecture. His lecture, entitled De platonici systematis fundamentio commentatio,68 concerns a classical problem in Plato’s philosophy: the place of the good in the world of ideas. Herbart published the lecture in 1805, adding an appendix or ‘Beylage’ which explains his argument and translates some of the Greek passages.69
Prima facie it is surprising to find Herbart lecturing on classical philosophy, a subject that scarcely surfaces in his earlier writings and correspondence. Yet Herbart, like all Gymnasia students of his day, was thoroughly trained in classical Greek, and he loved classical philosophy, especially Plato. In his ‘Beylage’ he stresses the relevance of classical philosophy to contemporary thought (331). There is no better introduction to philosophy, we are told, than the great classical thinkers, because they engage with problems in a more simple and straightforward way than moderns, who indulge in needless technicalities and subtleties. Many modern thinkers believe that they surpass the ancients, only to lapse into errors the ancients already foresaw. Furthermore, the basic concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato reappear in the latest systems of today, which are often an inconsistent mixture of them. Pointedly, Herbart notes that this is especially the case with Fichtean idealism. Herbart’s emphasis on the contemporary relevance of classical philosophy is the key to understanding the motivation behind his dissertation, which is really a parable about the errors of contemporary philosophy, especially Fichte’s and Schelling’s idealism, which were moving in an increasingly Platonic direction around 1802.70
In his lecture Herbart locates the core of Plato’s philosophy in his theory of ideas.71 He maintains that this theory grew out of Plato’s attempt to answer the question: What is the object of knowledge? Plato could not find this object in the sensible world, because he discovered contradictions within it. One and the same thing could be both heavy and light, small and large, beautiful and ugly, depending on its specific relations to other things. The object of knowledge, therefore, would have to be something whose being does not depend on its relations to other things, something that has independent being or being as such. This object is, of course, the idea. Although Herbart insists that Plato’s ideas are not substances, that they are not things that exist in some mysterious place (323–4), he does maintain that they alone have being or reality in the full sense of the word. According to his interpretation, Plato holds that everything in the sensible world, because it is subject to change and contradiction, lacks true being or reality, and so is only an illusion. Plato accepted Parmenides’ critique of Heraclitus: that we cannot ascribe change to being because this introduces negation into it; but since we see change in the sensible world, it follows that the sensible world cannot have true being, which we can find with the ideas alone.
The crucial question here concerns not the accuracy of Herbart’s interpretation of Plato, which we can well leave to classical scholars, but its philosophical meaning and his attitude towards it. It is striking, and not accidental, that Herbart’s interpretation is very Kantian: that Plato’s idealism consists in ascribing reality to the ideas alone, and in maintaining that everything in the sensible world is only an illusion.72 Herbart’s attitude towards such a theory is also very Kantian. He makes it very clear in his ‘Beylage’ that he does not accept such idealism: “Plato’s system is not my own.” (330). Rather than trying to destroy the reality of the sensible world to prove the sole reality of the ideas, Herbart, like Kant, wants to preserve that reality to prevent us from fleeing into the intelligible world. He too wants to affirm “the bathos of experience”. The challenge of Plato’s system for Herbart then consists in showing that the alleged contradictions in the sensible world are not really contradictions at all. In the ‘Beylage’ Herbart announces that he has a method for dissolving these contradictions, one that can save the reality of the sensible world. He calls it “the method of relations” or “the doctrine of the completion of concepts”. Yet he offers no explanation at all of this method, leaving us only with a name and a promissory note.
Fortunately, however, Herbart does provide an explanation elsewhere, though in an unlikely place, namely, the introduction to Pestalozzi’s Idee eines ABC der Anschauung (168–169). There we are told that it is the very nature of philosophy to isolate concepts, to strip them of their accidental associations, and to focus on them alone, as if they were independent entities. But in doing so philosophy removes concepts from their legitimate sphere of application; it treats them as if they have an unconditional validity on their own, quite apart from the specific conditions that give them their real sense and reference. The result of this feat of abstraction is that the use of these concepts gets caught in contradictions. We make general claims about the concepts, failing to see that they are true only in a specific sense and in a specific context. These contradictions serve as a stimulus to the philosopher to return the concepts to their original contexts, to show how their meaning depends on other concepts with which they stand in close necessary connections. Now “the chief purpose” of all philosophy, Herbart declares, consists in showing “the connections in the given”, in restoring the interconnections and context that have been lost by the isolation and abstraction of concepts. Though Herbart does not mention his “method of relations” in this passage, it is clear that he understands its purpose along the lines stated here. The task of the method of relations is to restore context and connection, and thus to remove contradictions that are involved in the hypostasization of concepts.
There is another short writing from Herbart’s early Göttingen years that is very revealing about his intellectual development, especially his evolving conception of philosophy. This is his Kurze Darstellung eines Plans zu philosophischen Vorlesungen, which appeared in 1804.73 Written with a student audience in mind, this piece is simple description of Herbart’s plans for his lectures on logic and metaphysics in 1804. Herbart defines philosophy as little more than the attempt to think about ultimate questions about the world and life. Philosophy has no definite a priori form, and its method is only that way of thinking that has become habitual because it has proven useful (294). More an activity than a system, philosophy is the activity of thinking for oneself. The best teacher of philosophy is one that encourages and cultivates this activity in his students, and not one who tries to indoctrinate them with his system. Some fifty years earlier Kant had given a very similar account of the purpose of philosophy in his plan for his lectures,74 and it would not be at all surprising if Herbart was thinking of the sage of Königsberg. For towards the close of the piece he notes the power of the Kantian Revolution upon his generation, and he declares that the leading thinkers of his day have not really moved far beyond it (298).
All in all, the theses and lecture plans of the early Göttingen years show much about what Herbart is moving away from but very little about where he is going to. We learn something about his negative attitude towards speculative idealism, traditional metaphysics, and the natural law tradition, but next to nothing about what is to replace them. It is noteworthy that Herbart is also sceptical about the Romantic worldview that had once seduced him in Bremen. Thus he flatly dismisses the intellectual intuition that played such a prominent role in Romantic thinking; and he even warns against a too Romantic interpretation of his aesthetic account of moral judgement. This interpretation, he declares pointedly, should not be confused with “a certain pretentious aesthetic that talks about the beautiful as the highest” (298). That was a clear jab against the Romantics and even some of his friends from the Gesellschaft der freien Männer.
The general picture that emerges from the early Göttingen years is of a young thinker refusing to define himself—hence he hates all systems—and who wants to be nothing more than a free spirit in philosophy. This was Herbart enjoying and asserting his independence. After years of struggle against the dominance of Fichte, and after flirting with Romantic ideas, Herbart had finally come into his own. Now that he had wiped the slate clean, he was ready, finally, to begin writing his own philosophy. We must now consider the first fruits of his newly-found independence.
In 1806 Herbart published his Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik,75 which he had composed in the summer of that year.76 This was a breakthrough work for him, which finally lays down the foundation for his own philosophy. His 1828 Allgemeine Metaphysik, which is his central work on metaphysics, was largely based upon the standpoint he had already reached in his Hauptpuncte. Because of its historical and systematic importance, we do well to examine its content and arguments.
The Hauptpuncte is brief but dense, discussing in very concentrated form some of the central problems of metaphysics. Unfortunately, its exposition is uncompromising, offering few aids to the ordinary reader. The subtitle of the book warns us that it is “composed for prepared listeners” (vorgeübten Zuhörern zusammengestellt), who were advanced students of Herbart’s own lectures. The preface refuses to make further explanations for the reader and warns us that it contains only what is necessary from a “strict scientific point of view”. Such an approach poses serious challenges to the contemporary reader, however, who cannot count himself among Herbart’s “prepared listeners”. The major challenge is the sheer obscurity of the work, which makes for different, even conflicting, interpretations. We will attempt to compensate for this obscurity by placing Herbart’s work in its historical and systematic context.
Prima facie it seems odd for Herbart, who now has Kantian predelictions, to be embarking on metaphysics, the very discipline whose impossibility had been demonstrated by Kant in the first Kritik. Yet it is important to understand what Herbart meant by metaphysics. It is decidedly not the science of the absolute, as it was in Schelling and Hegel. Though the dense exposition of the Hauptpuncte tells no secrets, some of Herbart’s lectures on the introduction to philosophy, which were given around the same time, reveal his meaning.77 There metaphysics is defined in Kantian terms as “the science of the conceivability of experience” (327).78 The task of metaphysics, Herbart further explains, is to show how the central concepts of experience are possible. It will do so by showing how one concept is possible only through its relations to other concepts. To demonstrate these relations, Herbart will follow “a method of relations”. This was the method which he had baptized in the ‘Beylage’ to his dissertation, and which he had expounded in the introduction to Pestalozzi’s Idee.79
The Kantian conception and approach behind the Hauptpuncte emerges in the few elucidatory comments in the preface. These comments are polemical and directed against Herbart’s opponents, who are the Schellingians. In his view, they have a dogmatic metaphysics which claims to have knowledge of the absolute. Against them, Herbart reminds us of the progress of metaphysics since Kant. We now know that it is an error to regard cognition as a mirroring of its object, and that we cannot know things-in-themselves (177–178). We also know since Fichte, Herbart adds, that whoever talks about being also thinks about it, and that for just this reason he will have to justify his thinking (178). This comment, which is an allusion to Fichte’s dispute with Schelling, shows Herbart taking sides with his former teacher. He was essentially accusing the Schellingians of dogmatism, of trying to escape the question of justification by appealing to an intellectual intuition. Herbart was reminding them that it is impossible to escape the demand for evidence. The question always remained: How do they know that what they intuit is the divine? To drive his point home, Herbart cites some lines from Kant: “Even the holy gospel must be compared with moral perfection before one recognizes it as such?”80
The Hauptpuncte begins with a discussion of method, specifically with “the method of relations”. While he had sketched only a rough idea of that method in his earlier writings, he now gives for the first time a technical and logical account of it.
Herbart introduces his discussion with a classical problem of logic: What is the connection between ground and consequent? There seems no simple and precise way to specify that connection. If we say that the consequent is identical with the ground, the inference shows us nothing new and is only a tautology. If, however, the consequent is distinct from the ground, there is no necessary connection and no valid inference (179). For Herbart, this problem is the same as Kant’s fundamental problem: How is synthetic unity possible? How can there be a necessary connection between distinct terms? The same problem recurs because the necessary connection requires identity between the terms, though they should be distinct from one another. As we have seen, Herbart’s reflections on this problem go back to the 1790s. Only then Herbart saw this problem as identical with the issue of self-consciousness. In the Hauptpuncte that Fichtean perspective disappears entirely, with the “Ich” abruptly dismissed as “the most annoying of fantasies” (185–186). The problem of synthetic unity is now discussed on a strictly logical level.
How can we resolve the problem of synthetic unity? We do so, Herbart says, if we postulate a third term, a mediating concept between the distinct terms (180). This mediating concept is a whole having distinct parts or aspects. The whole connects its parts or aspects because it is in both of them; but it also separates them because it is not in them in the same way at the same time. To show how synthetic unity is possible in any specific case, we must determine how the parts of a whole are both identical to and distinct from one another.
The task of the method of relations is to show us how synthetic unity is possible for the general concepts of experience. It does so by exposing and resolving contradictions involved in the use of these concepts (181). There is a danger of contradiction involved in all these concepts, Herbart points out, because, as synthetic unities, their terms need to be identical to yet distinct from one another (182). To resolve the contradiction, we show the respects in which the terms are the same and the respects in which they are different. But this is not the end of the matter because contradictions can arise on a deeper level. The parts M and N of the whole A are themselves wholes having parts m and n. The problems that we have found between M and N now arise within M and N themselves. Their parts m and n appear in contradiction because they too are synthetic unities, which are both the same and different; so the same operation of finding the respects in which m and n are different and the same must continue. And so on. Herbart poses no limit to how far we can pursue the analysis involved in the method of relations.
Whatever its exact formal structure, the chief point behind the method of relations is transcendental: to show how a synthetic a priori concept is possible. Such a concept, Herbart thinks, is a necessary condition of experience, basic to how we conceive and perceive our world. The method of relations shows how these concepts are possible by removing the contradictions in their use, which it does by showing how each concept forms a coherent whole, a synthetic unity where some of its elements are the same in some respects and different in other respects. Through the method of relations, metaphysics can then claim to be “the science of the conceivability of experience.”
A procedure of exposing and resolving contradiction, and of doing so by showing how concepts form coherent wholes, makes Herbart’s method of relations sound very much like Hegel’s dialectic, which was developed around the same time.81 The method of relations seems a dialectic for Hegelians, the dialectic a method of relations for Herbartians. Are, though, these methods really the same? Though there are indeed structural similarities, it is noteworthy that they have utterly opposed uses or goals. The aim of Herbart’s method is to show only the possibility and reality of experience, to remove the contradictions discovered by idealist philosophers who are all too ready to declare the world of experience a realm of illusion. The aim of Hegel’s method, though, is the exact opposite: to show that the finite world on its own is illusory and that it has reality only as an appearance of the absolute or idea.
After his opening reflections on methodology, Herbart takes us into the depths of metaphysics proper. His “transcendental enquiry”, as he calls it, consists in an abstruse discussion of the most abstract concepts of metaphysics, viz., being, essence, force, substance, change. The entire metaphysics is sketched in fourteen sections, whose extreme density poses a challenge to the most patient reader. We cannot provide here an analysis, let alone a summary, of these sections. Our only task is to focus on those passages relevant to Herbart’s emerging conception of transcendental idealism.
Herbart begins with that most basic of metaphysical concepts: being (Seyn) (§1). Before analyzing it, though, he reminds his reader: “Transcendental enquiry bears in mind that the thinker always remains enclosed in the circle of his representations” (§1; 188). For this reason, he says, we can speak of being only insofar as we attach a thought to it. What is that thought? What is the act of thinking that expresses being?
Herbart equates the thought of being with the simple act of positing, that is, assuming that something exists. “To explain that A is, is to explain that the matter rests with the simple positing of A.” (§1; 188). Being is therefore sheer existence, nothing more. Herbart insists that we should not assume from the mere concept of being that there is a plurality of beings. The concept of being is neither one nor many but simply that which is posited.
Like Kant, Herbart insists that existence is not a predicate. It adds no new content to the subject of an assertion; to say that something exists is not to attribute a determinate property to that thing. Since it is not a property, existence has no degrees, so that the whole notion of a most perfect being, an ens realissimum, makes no sense (189). And since it is only in virtue of a property that one thing relates to another, being in itself is self-sufficient, having no relations to anything else. It is therefore utterly simple, indeed completely inexplicable, because to explain something means to determine its relations to, or connections with, other things (189).
Having explained the concept of being, Herbart proceeds to that of essence (Wesen) (§2). What is thought of as being, something that exists, is a being (ein Wesen) (§2; 190). Essence is therefore the being of this or that thing. Essence as such, however, is necessarily one, Herbart argues, because being is utterly simple, excluding all relation. It is one not in the sense that it is one indivisible thing among many, but in the sense that it excludes all plurality. Since it has no relations, it has neither plurality, nor quantity, nor degree, nor infinity, which all presuppose relations in some form. It is only a figure of speech, therefore, when Herbart talks about “a being” in the singular, as if it were one among a plurality of beings. Strictly speaking, we cannot assume that there is a plurality of things, at least not insofar as we consider the sheer being of a thing. All things that have being are the same insofar as they have being, that is, insofar as we regard their essence alone (§2; 190). If, then, there is a multiplicity of things, their plurality must come from some other source than their mere existence.
So far, Herbart’s analysis of being or essence makes it seem utterly ineffable. We cannot state anything definite about being, because to do so would be to ascribe some property to it when being is utterly propertyless. Since being is utterly simple, excluding all relations, and since to explain something is to relate it to other things, being seems utterly inscrutable. Still, the fact remains that we do talk about being, that we do say what it is. The question then arises: What status should we give to our talk about being? Not fearing the consequences of his radical position, Herbart places all talk of being outside being itself (§2; 190–191). When we talk about being, he says, we use an image (Bild), which should not be confused with what it is an image of, that is, with being itself (§2; 190). These images are only how we view being and they are accidental to being itself. Herbart therefore calls them “accidental views” (zufällige Ansichten) (§2; 190).
After treating the very general and abstract concepts of being and essence (§§1–2), Herbart then proceeds to consider their application to experience (§§3–9). More specifically, he examines the concept of being as a particular thing in experience (§§3–5). This involves investigating first of all the concepts of substance and its accidents (§3).
It is a basic fact of our experience, Herbart says, that the simple sensations of experience are never found on their own but that they are always in connection with one another; they appear in complexes, which we call things or substances (§3; 191). There is a problem, however, with the concept of a thing. We think of the thing as a unity, as the whole of all its properties. But these properties are utterly different from one another. Each of them refers to a distinct kind of sensation, which is utterly unique and simple; for example, no one can make a single sensation comprising the yellowness and heaviness of gold. The form and the matter of the thing are then in conflict: the form (the complex) posits one single being; the matter (the distinct properties) gives us a multiplicity of beings (§3; 192). Yet this one being and these many beings should be, somehow, one and the same. Here, then, lies one of those contradictions that Herbart claims to be pervasive in the ordinary concepts of experience.
Already at this point in his discussion Herbart reaches a significant conclusion: “that we cannot know things-in-themselves” (§3 Anm.; 192). We have already seen how sections §1–2 make being itself unknowable, but that does not give us the conclusion that particular things are unknowable. Why does that additional point follow? Though Herbart does not explain, we can reconstruct his reasoning from his other assumptions. Herbart has made several contrasts between the thing itself and the properties by which it is known: while the thing is one, its properties are many, each distinct from the other; while the thing is unique, its properties classify it and compare it to other things; and while the thing is indivisible, the properties divide it into distinct aspects. The basic problem seems to be that each thing is essentially propertyless, whereas all knowledge of things takes place through their properties. To know a thing is to be able to say what it is; but to say what it is involves the attribution of some property to the thing. So Herbart seems to be reasoning as follows: if the essence of the thing is propertyless, and if all knowledge is through properties, then the essence of the thing is unknowable.
Having determined that things-in-themselves are unknowable, Herbart goes on to draw another significant conclusion to vindicate the critical philosophy: that empiricism and rationalism are both necessary and complementary. This follows from the fact that we need to postulate a single thing beyond the senses (as rationalism demands), and that we must see each of its properties as given in experience (as empiricism insists). Whatever weight we care to give to Herbart’s reasoning for these conclusions, they show how his metaphysics intends to confirm fundamental doctrines of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
After discussing the concept of substance and accident, Herbart introduces the concept of change (Veränderung) (§4). This concept brings with it, however, further contradictions in our concept of a thing. We sometimes regard a thing as just the conjunction of its properties. Asked what the thing is, we just list its properties; gold, as Locke tells us, is that substance that is yellow, malleable and soluable in aqua regia. Because the thing is just the conjunction of its properties, it requires all of them, such that if only one were changed, we would have a new thing (§4; 193). But this means that the identity of things will be constantly changing, and that we will never be able to talk about the same thing amid change. To avoid these consequences, we adopt another conflicting conception of a thing, which is no more plausible. According to this conception, we ascribe identity to a thing throughout change, so that even if some of its properties change—even if it has gained some new ones or lost some old ones—we still regard it as one and the same thing. So we identify the thing with, yet distinguish it from, its many properties. “A contradiction therefore lies before our eyes: that one substance ought to be many, and that many ought to be one.” (§4; 193)
How do we resolve this contradiction? Content for now to play the role of dialectician, Herbart does not propose a solution. Rather than resolving the tension, he increases it by posing another contradiction. In a passage showing uncanny parallels with Hegel,82 Herbart introduces the concept of force (Kraft) (§5). The concept of force seems to explain the unity of a thing and the diversity of its properties (§5; 194). The force unifies all these properties, which are one and all its manifestations. The concept of force and its manifestation now takes over the role of substance and accident. But we quickly discover that the concept of force is no less problematic than its predecessor. The problem is trying to explain how all these properties form a unity, how they belong to a single thing. On the one hand, each property has its determinate quality in virtue of contrast or negation, in virtue of the fact that it is not another property; on the other hand, each is a simple unique positive quality, “a unique, simple what”, and as such stands alone and does not negate another (195). Neither view explains the unity of the thing: the former gives us contrasting qualities that exclude one another, whereas the other gives us unique and independent qualities standing indifferently alongside one another.
Somewhat mysteriously, Herbart ascribes to each being “an act of self-preservation” (Act der Selbsterhaltung) (§5; 195). Though he introduces this concept with little explanation, its rationale follows from some of his earlier moves. He has used the concept of force to explain the unity of a thing; and he has also stressed a thing’s identity over time. Putting these together, one gets the idea of a force to maintain one’s identity, that is, self-preservation. If there is such a force, Herbart reasons, there must be also another countervailing force, which he calls a disturbance (Störung). These disturbances do not change the inner identity of a thing, however, which is maintained in its being by its inner power of self-preservation. This account of acts of self-preservation and their disturbances play a fundamental role in Herbart’s psychology, as we shall soon see.83
After treating the concepts of substance, change and force (§§3–5), Herbart examines the no less fundamental concepts of space, time, motion and causality (§§6–9). The most striking feature of his account of space and time is his departure from Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. Herbart had already showed his misgivings about the Transcendental Aesthetic in the introduction to his book when he argued that the Kantian doctrine that space is an a priori form of intuition cannot explain the origin of specific spatial appearances, that is, that we see here a triangle and there a circle (186). That quarrel with the Transcendental Aesthetic continues when Herbart questions the assumptions of absolute space and time (§§6–7). Herbart constructs the concept of an intelligible space from the places occupied by objects, so that space follows from the relations between these places (§7; 198–199). The notion of an absolute space preceding all these constructions Herbart dismisses as a mere abstraction (201). Absolute time is dismissed on similar grounds. It is simply the form in which something goes through space, that is, succession, the way in which one body continuously changes its place (§8; 203). Time is nothing more than the quantity of succession, divided by speed (203). Just as Herbart found contradictions in the concept of a thing and its properties, so he finds contradictions in the concepts of absolute space, time and motion. In devising these contradictions he takes his cue from Zeno’s paradoxes.
Throughout his analysis of experience, Herbart is preoccupied with finding contradictions in the most basic concepts. This is just what we should expect from his method of relations, whose task is to expose such contradictions. It is striking, however, that Herbart poses no solutions to these contradictions, which is no less a task of his method. On several occasions he invokes the method of relations to analyse the contradictions; but these analyses only clarify the reasons for the contradictions without resolving them. What is going on? It is only in a section titled ‘Uebergang zum Idealismus’, attached at the close of section §9, that we are given some explanation of the aim of the proceedings. Here Herbart states that the doctrines of the nothingness of space, time and motion, and the unknowability of things-in-themselves, belong to a realistic metaphysics (204). All these doctrines, he says, are connected with the positing of something real, which seems to be indicated by experience. This entire realism, he then adds, is “the inevitable booty of idealism”. This idealism, though apparently irrefutable from the outside, explodes from its inner contradictions (205).
What does Herbart mean with these cryptic lines? Is he committing himself to idealism or realism? And what does he mean “idealism” and “realism”? It is on the basis of these lines that some scholars regard Herbart as a realist opposed to Kant’s transcendental idealism. But a closer look at the context shows that Herbart is not taking issue with Kant but siding with him.
Herbart seems to suggest that the contradictions arising within experience arise from transcendental realism, that is, the assumption that appearances are things-in-themselves. Herbart is then alluding to the Kantian doctrine that the antinomies arise from transcendental realism, and that their solution rests upon transcendental idealism. The idealism that explodes from inner contradictions is not, however, transcendental idealism but the idealism criticized by Kant in the Prolegomena, that is, that idealism which holds that space, time and the things of experience are only illusory. That Herbart has in mind this sense of “idealism” is clear from his closing remark that Kant has used the term “idealism” to designate “those early doctrines of the nothingness of space and time, etc.” Herbart complains about the confusions created by Kant’s usage, not least because he uses the term “idealism” to describe his own “transcendental idealism”.
That Herbart regards transcendental idealism as the solution to these contradictions is apparent from section §10, ‘Idealismus’. For here we learn that there are two realms, a realm of appearance (Schein) and realm of being, which is that of “intelligible nature” (205). Herbart insists that these two worlds are completely separate: that, though the realm of being appears through the form of appearance, it cannot explain anything in that realm, either individually or collectively. But there must be something that carries or bears the realm of appearance, and that is some representing being. The sharp division between noumena and phenomena, being and appearance, suggests that the contradictions involved in the basic concepts of experience are resolvable through something like the Kantian strategy in the dynamical antinomies: making the thesis apply to things-in-themselves, the antithesis to appearances. Though Herbart never states that he is employing such a strategy, it is consistent with his general adoption of transcendental idealism (i.e. the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves) and his insistence that the antinomies be resolved through the method of relations.
The transcendental idealism that emerges from the Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik is Kantian in its broad outlines. It adopts the central Kantian distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances, which Kant uses to define his own transcendental idealism. It also maintains that we have knowledge of appearances alone, that things-in-themselves are forever inaccessible to us. Prima facie Herbart comes to these very Kantian conclusions from very non-Kantian premises, from the analysis of the concepts of being, substance, change and power. The Transcendental Aesthetic, which is so central to Kant’s transcendental idealism, plays no role in Herbart’s. Yet, from another perspective, even Herbart’s premises are Kantian, because he comes to his distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves by extending the strategy of the Antinomies to the concepts of experience. The modus operandi of Herbart’s book is indeed to bring the antinomies of the Transcendental Dialectic right into the realm of experience itself.
Still, Herbart’s transcendental idealism is not exactly or entirely Kant’s. There is a greater element of realism in Herbart’s transcendental idealism insofar as it stresses the givenness and irreducibility of the particular qualities of the manifold of sense. My world is not simply reducible to the realm of my consciousness because that consciousness arises from my interaction with other beings which disturb my pure activity. Hence Herbart writes about his own “strict realism” (strenge Realismus), according to which the appearances of representing beings arise from “the most colourful mixture of disturbances” involved in their interaction with one another (§14; 215–216). To this extent, then, those who ascribe realism to Herbart are not entirely wrong; it’s just that his realism has to be placed in the context of his transcendental idealism as a whole.
The Göttingen years were Herbart’s most productive. Having overcome the crisis of his Bremen days and eager to make a name for himself, Herbart began to publish one book after another. In 1806 he published not only the Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik but also his Allgemeine Pädagogik, which put forward his educational ideas in systematic form.84 Shortly after both these works appeared, he published another shorter one on philosophy, his Ueber philosophisches Studium, which appeared in 1807.85 In style, expression and audience this work is the very opposite of the Hauptpuncte: it is clear and straightforward, directed not towards the initiated but the novice. Its aim is pedagogic: to introduce the student to the goals and methods of philosophy.
Apart from its pedagogic value, Ueber philosophisches Studium has an important place in Herbart’s intellectual development. It was his first systematic attempt to define his conception of philosophy and its methodology. Though it is not so explicit, Herbart’s account is partisan, indeed polemical. He sets forward his conception of philosophy in deliberate opposition against the speculative idealism of Fichte and Schelling, and in doing so falls back on the Kantian tradition. Herbart’s conception of philosophy in this work is decidedly Kantian in spirit, anticipating ideas common in the neo-Kantian tradition. To see the roots of neo-Kantianism, we should study Herbart’s text, not Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen.
Herbart begins by rejecting the view, which was characteristic of speculative idealism, that philosophy should provide the first principles of all knowledge, or that it should be the foundation for all the sciences. Rather than starting with first principles, which it grounds on an esoteric intellectual intuition, philosophy should start with the examination of the logic of our ordinary concepts and the principles of the special sciences (234). It is not that Herbart thinks that everything is in order with these concepts and principles as they stand, and that the philosopher should do nothing more than comment upon them. Rather, he insists that philosophy must be a critical examination of these concepts and principles. All too often some of them—viz., being, activity, cause, continuity—raise paradoxes and contradictions, and it is the task of the philosopher to resolve them. True to the Kantian tradition, Herbart rejects both empiricism and rationalism as one-sided strategies for solving these problems. Empiricism tries to escape these problems, as if experience were given and unproblematic, while rationalism attempts to solve them on the basis of some higher principles that transcend experience. Neither approach works: empiricism needs to resort to rational analysis to solve problems; and the abstract principles of rationalism are empty if they are not based on experience. Proper philosophical method, Herbart implies, involves the abstract reasoning of rationalism combined with the reference to experience of empiricism.
Like many modern philosophers, Herbart sees philosophy as a problem-solving enterprise. It should first and foremost focus on the problems raised by ordinary discourse and the principles of the special sciences. Its task is then to find “the true construction of a problem”, that is, to see all the factors that compose it and the requirements for its solution (237). The true method of philosophy should be “pure self-surrender to the nature of the problem” (reine Hingebung an die Natur des Problems). Or, as Herbart puts it more simply: “Speculation is the striving toward the resolution of problems” (267). This does not mean, however, that philosophy should be nothing more than piece-meal problem solving. Herbart insists on the value of striving for greater unity of knowledge, on the need to construct a general system in which all partial perspectives are organized into a coherent whole (249). Yet at the same time he also warns about the pitfalls of premature system-building: it forces the data of experience into preconceived moulds, and it prematurely ends enquiry (243–244). The striving for a system should move forward, he advises, only insofar as it can correct itself.
No less than Fries, Herbart recommends an analytic method for philosophy, one that begins with “the bathos of experience”, the analysis of ordinary concepts and concrete intuitions. The philosopher needs to immerse himself into his subject matter, sinking into “the black night of eternal death and the furious fires of hell” (239). After his experience he should form a “basic concept” (Hauptbegriff) to articulate what he has seen, and which will serve as the starting point of his investigation. He should explore the logic of this concept, all the while testing its implications against the particulars of experience (240–241). In forming his basic concept the philosopher will have to rely on intuition; but this intuition should be simply a provisional starting point for later critical reflection. On no account does it provide a rationale or evidence for a first principle, as an intellectual intuition is supposed to do. Herbart envisages many different starting points for a philosophical investigation, where each starting point depends on the philosopher’s individual “standpoint” or “attitude” (Ansicht). But the variety of these viewpoints, he stresses, should be taken as an opportunity rather than a problem. The best philosophical system will be one that brings together all basic concepts, all partial standpoints, which together form the truth (245).
The title and timing of Herbart’s work indicate that he intended it to compete with Schelling’s earlier lectures on philosophical method.86 Sure enough, much of the work consists in a polemic against the methods of “the two great men”, who, though unnamed, are unmistakably Fichte and Schelling. Herbart takes exception chiefly to their a priori methods, their appeal to intellectual intuitions to justify their first principles, their imposition of abstract schemata upon the wealth of particular facts, and their beginning philosophy with abstract principles or concepts, viz., the absolute or the ego, which are not derived from experience (254, 271). While Herbart thinks that philosophy should indeed aspire to systematic unity, he thinks that it is important to realize that this unity is only for us as knowers and that it need not correspond to reality itself; he again insists upon distinguishing between the ratio cognoscendi and ratio essendi, the order of knowledge and being, just as he once did in his critique of Schelling. What distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines, Herbart insists, is that it is second-order, an investigation into our concepts of things rather than things themselves (274).
In the course of his polemic against Fichte and Schelling, Herbart announces his departure from a fundamental doctrine of the idealist tradition: the unity of reason (259–60, 275). Though the aspiration towards systematic unity is indispensable, there is one basic dualism that no system will ever surmount: that between norm and fact, between practice and theory. There is no “principle of unification” for such distinct kinds of discourse, Herbart contends (285–286). He thinks that both Fichte and Schelling have confused this distinction: Fichte by attempting to derive experience from the moral law; and Schelling by introducing a teleological perspective into nature (255–259).
For all his critique of idealist methodology, Herbart still does not break with it entirely. On one important score he is still a follower of Fichte: in his use of a dialectical method. In his Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre Fichte had applied a combined method of analysis and synthesis to discover and resolve contradictions between concepts. Herbart took this as the inspiration for his “method of relations”,87 which he first expounded in his Hauptpuncte and now reaffirms in Ueber philosophisches Studium.88 As Herbart now explains it, the method of relations consists in the progressive analysis of a concept by finding the middle terms between its components (273). A middle term C that connects A and B is determined by analysis to be connected to A and B only by virtue of another term C’, which connects C to A and C to B; and so on. Given his ban on a priori methodologies, it is somewhat surprising to see Herbart following Fichte on such an important score. Herbart believes, however, that his use of this method is more “critical” than that of his predecessors, that is, he regards it as strictly a method of exposition rather than one of discovery.
The final work of Herbart’s Göttingen years was his Allgemeine praktische Philosophie, which was published in 1808.89 This work laid down the basis for his ethics, just as the Hauptpuncte set forth the foundation for his metaphysics. True to his insistence on maintaining a firm distinction between the normative and natural, the practical and theoretical, Herbart makes metaphysics and ethics two distinct domains of philosophy. They are for him not just separate parts but equal co-ordinate ones. Fichte was as wrong to subordinate the theoretical to the ethical as Spinoza was to subordinate the ethical to the theoretical. Though insisting on their equal status, Herbart devoted most of his time and energy to metaphysics and the theoretical branches of philosophy. The Allgemeine praktische Philosophie was his only systematic work on ethics.
There is something of a mystery to Herbart’s ethics. For he had insisted that, of all parts of his philosophy, it showed his greatest debts to Kant.90 Yet in ethics Herbart departs from Kant in the most fundamental ways: he denies that there is a single principle of morality; he insists that reason is not the source of moral obligation; he maintains that obligation has to be determined on the basis of particular situations; and he bases morals on aesthetics. Where, then, lies the debt to Kant? We can only imagine Kant reciting that old Italian saying he had once applied to Fichte: “May God protect us from our friends; against our enemies we can take care of ourselves.”91 The solution to the mystery, as we shall soon see, is that Herbart constructed his ethics from building blocks taken from Kant’s aesthetics.
Herbart’s best account of his foundation for morality appears in the introduction to the Allgemeine praktische Philosophie. He begins with the classic problem of ethics: whether something should be good because we desire it, or whether we should desire it because it is good (334). Herbart’s solution sides with the latter alternative. Although he recognizes that values by their very nature involve human desires, he denies that values are determined by desire alone (335). Indeed, he insists that the good takes precedence over desire. For it is only on that basis that it is possible to judge and value desires themselves. It is the “basic presupposition” of practical philosophy, he maintains, that there be such a thing as “will-less valuation” (Willenlose Schätzung) (335).
Though fundamental, this presupposition is undermined by every prevalent form of ethics, in Herbart’s view. There are three current theories about the foundation of ethics: a theory of the good (Güterlehre), which bases ethics on the good; a theory of virtue (Tugendlehre), which founds it on virtue; and a theory of duty (Pflichtenlehre), which gives primacy to duty. Herbart rejects all three, because they share one common faulty assumption. That assumption is that the will is primary, the basic rule and source of value (337). Thus the theory of the good assumes that the good is the goal of the will; the theory of virtue makes the will the supreme power behind virtue; and the theory of duty assumes that the will is the source of duty, the supreme commander (338). The fundamental problem with this assumption, Herbart argues, is that it becomes impossible to judge the will (338). These theories do not go far enough in their search for the source of morality, because they do not enquire into the basis of the value of the will itself (337–338).
Herbart’s position will make more sense if we see it as a critique of Kant’s concept of autonomy. Kant had made the third formulation of the moral law his principle of autonomy, according to which a human being is “subject only to laws which are made by himself”, so that the subject “is bound only to act in conformity with a will which is his own”.92 Herbart finds this conception problematic because a will that makes the laws also can break them; it stands above all responsibility and accountability since it can by sheer fiat invalidate any law that would dare to pronounce a sentence against it; as the sovereign source of law itself, such a will can “loosen” just as easily as it can “bind”. Of course, Kant insists that the moral will is rational, that its laws should be universalizable, binding everyone’s desires and inclinations on all occasions. But, rejecting the categorical imperative as a sufficient criterion of morality, Herbart doubts that the Kantian will can have a rational content; there are all kinds of universalizable imperatives, depending on the will from which one begins.93 Given the emptiness of the Kantian criterion, the sheer formality of the universalizability requirement, the Kantian will becomes a serious danger, having the power to make virtually anything into a universal law. Since the will cannot regulate itself, there needs to be some higher source of moral authority. Herbart’s practical philosophy was his attempt to determine that source.
Given that practical philosophy has to be based on will-less valuation, on judgement that has authority over the will, what kind of valuation or judgement should that be? Without providing any argument, Herbart simply declares that this kind of valuation or judgement should be aesthetic.94 Morality should take from aesthetics, he advises, a model of judgement that is independent of the will, and which has authority over it (390). Prima facie aesthetic judgement satisfies this requirement, because it determines something to be beautiful or sublime even if it is not an object of desire or the will. Though Herbart does not refer to Kant here, his reliance on Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement is obvious, indeed so much so that he probably felt no need to point it out. In the third Kritik Kant had famously argued that judgements of taste are independent of interest, and that their pleasure comes strictly from the act of contemplation (intuition or reflection) alone.95 Since aesthetic judgements are disinterested, and since interest involves desire or will, aesthetic judgements are also independent of desire and the will.96 This doctrine of disinterested aesthetic contemplation was one of the crucial building blocks of Herbart’s own ethics.
We can explain Herbart’s appeal to aesthetic judgement as a solution to the problem of moral obligation if we consider it as a response to Kant’s confessed failure to resolve that problem. In the third section of the Grundlegung Kant admitted that he could provide no explanation for why we should take an interest in the idea of morality, or for why we should subject ourselves to the moral law. Granted, it is rational to act on the categorical imperative; but that still begs the question why I should be rational. As Kant explained:
Why should I subject myself to this principle [the moral law], and indeed as a rational being in general? I readily concede that no interest drives me, for that would not give a categorical imperative; but I must still take an interest and see how that happens; for this obligation (Sollen) is properly a willing (Wollen), which holds for every rational being under the condition that reason is practical in him without any hindrance … If someone asks why the universality of our maxim as a law should be the limiting condition of our action, and upon what we base the worth that we attribute to it, we cannot give him any answer.97
Citing this very passage,98 Herbart takes it as evidence that Kant has not taken his enquiries far enough. He accepts Kant’s point that the interest in the moral law cannot derive from sensibility, from any inclination, need or desire, because that would destroy the integrity of the moral law, which demands that duty should be the sole motive for our action. He also recognizes that the interest cannot derive from reason, given that the question is what interest we should take in being rational. What, then, should provide an interest in acting according to reason? It is precisely here that Herbart thinks that aesthetics comes to the aid of moral philosophy. It is aesthetics alone that can explain why we should take an interest in morality. An aesthetic interest is neither sensible nor rational but something in between: it gives us a disinterested pleasure in witnessing morally good actions, and indeed in inspiring us to do them. It is the beautiful and the sublime that motivates and inspires us to act morally. Here again Herbart can be seen to be developing an idea already implicit in Kant, who had himself stressed the moral dimension of the idea of the sublime.99 Kant came close to an aesthetic point of view in morality, Herbart maintains, when he set forth the idea of humanity as an end in itself.100 That idea presupposes the idea of dignity, which also invokes that of the sublime, the idea of a value transcending all the forces of nature.
Though basing much of his theory on Kant, Herbart goes on to provide his own account of aesthetic judgement. He declares that he is especially concerned to separate aesthetic from moral judgement, so that it never collapses back into the moral, and so that it never loses its authority over the will (341). He finds two basic differences between aesthetic and moral judgement. First, the representation of the beautiful or sublime in aesthetic judgement should be singular and complete, whereas the representation of the good in moral judgement is general and incomplete (343–344). Second, the representation of the object in an aesthetic judgement must be separate from our attitude towards it, whether we approve or disapprove it, whereas the representation of the good in moral judgement involves our approval of it (344). Herbart qualifies this last point regarding aesthetic judgement: it is only the content that we perceive with indifference; the relations between its content are immediately perceived with approval or disapproval (345). He gives this example from music: though we are indifferent to any particular sound, we perceive the combination of sounds with either pleasure or displeasure. For Herbart, as indeed for Kant, the special object of aesthetic appraisal is form. He envisages a science of aesthetics that determines the most basic forms and which kinds of pleasures are connected with them (345).
Pursuing his aesthetic analogy, Herbart maintains that moral judgement is based on what he calls “moral taste”.101 Taste in general he defines as a power of perceiving and judging particular forms or unique relations between things (350). Just as a form of taste, moral judgement is not different from other kinds of taste, namely, poetic, musical and plastic (347). Like aesthetic taste, it perceives and judges particular relations or unique forms. Excellence in moral taste, just like that of aesthetic taste, requires sensitivity to the particular features of objects—what Hume called “delicacy” and Herbart calls “tenderness of feeling” (Zartheit des Gefühls) (353). Moral taste does have, however, some distinctive features of its own apart from aesthetic taste. What is distinctive about it is that it judges desire itself and not simply (as other forms of taste) the object of desire (348). It concerns especially our own inner states and not simply objects outside us (347–348). Its special concern is the human will, and specifically how these wills relate to one another in particular circumstances.
The most obvious problem for an aesthetic theory of morality is that it seems to forfeit the universality required of moral judgement. Judgements of taste are notoriously personal and contradictory, so that there seems no hope of deriving the universality of moral judgements. Herbart considers the objection in some detail in a special section of his introduction.102 His response to it is surprising and dramatic: that we should just drop the universality requirement in moral judgement. The ideal of a fundamental moral principle that provides a standard of judgement for all circumstances is illusory, he argues. He comes to this conclusion not from a critique of the Kantian categorical imperative—though that does lie at the back of his mind—but from an appreciation of the fact that moral judgements always concern very complex and unique circumstances. “Human life is much too colourful for us to know a priori all the simple relations of the will and how they will encounter one another.” (351) Herbart does allow for a minimal kind of universalizability, and does not permit the possibility of conflicting judgements about the same case; he insists upon consistency, that people should judge alike in the exact same circumstances. The problem is that when we specify the circumstances, all the factors making for the judgement, the law ceases to be very general at all; it is universalizable only in the sense that it is consistent but not in the sense that it is general (350). Hence the lack of generality is more a strength than a weakness of an aesthetic theory of morality. For the aesthetic theory rightly emphasizes the particularity and uniqueness of the object of moral judgement. Just as aesthetic judgement concerns a particular work of art, so moral judgement concerns a particular action under particular circumstances.
Although Herbart stresses the unique situations of moral life, he does not throw overboard all general rules and guidelines in ethics. While there is no general principle of morality that will be sufficient in all cases, there are still many general guidelines that we might or might not want to apply in a particular situation, depending on the exact circumstances of the case. We can form general moral concepts when we focus on the similarities between different cases and abstract from the peculiarities of the particular circumstances. These general concepts Herbart calls “practical ideas”, which we acquire not through induction but by an act of intellectual rather than sensible intuition (352).103 The rest of Herbart’s ethics is then devoted to outlining the specific ideas governing our practical life, though an account of them goes well beyond our purposes here.
Though Herbart was happy in Göttingen, and so much so that he even declined an offer from Heidelberg, his happiness was not to last. Political events soon cast a cloud over his future there. After Napoleon’s victory over Prussia in the battles of Jena and Auerstadt in October 1806, Prussia lost control of all its territories west of the Elbe, first and foremost among them Hannover, which now became a puppet kingdom of Napoleon’s brother Jérome. Göttingen was within the principality of Hannover, and so now came under French rule. Though the new French government professed to protect the university and to guarantee academic freedom, the university was forced, on short notice, to raise enormous sums of money to lend to the government. This “Zwangsanleihe”, or compulsory loan, brought the University to the verge of financial ruin. To add insult to injury, the new government also abolished the old tax exemptions for professors, who were now forced to pay “back taxes”. Herbart himself had to pay the new government, within twenty days, 1,500 francs, an enormous sum for him, which he could raise only by borrowing from his old friend Smidt.104 As a result of these events, and the glum prospect of renewed French exploitation, the general mood in Göttingen was very bleak.105 It seemed that Göttingen had no future—especially so for Herbart. Not only was there the oppression of living under French rule, but there was also the realization that all his plans for the reform of the university would come to nothing. All his pedagogical hopes and ideals were now dashed. To escape it all, Herbart longed to leave Göttingen. As he told Smidt, February 15, 1808: “Everything is now so bleak–I often seriously think of getting completely away from this place.”106
Thus it came almost as deliverance, when, entirely unexpectedly on October 1808, Herbart received news of an impending offer from the University of Königsberg.107 The first successor to Kant’s chair, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, had accepted an offer from Leipzig, thus leaving Kant’s throne vacant. Because of his writings, success with students and expertise in pedagogy, Herbart seemed to the Prussian authorities the best man for the job. His knowledge of pedagogy, they noted, was especially valuable for the reform of education in Prussia. After some quick and easy negotiations, Herbart accepted the offer, 1,100 thalers, which was enough to remove all his financial worries and debts. For the next twenty-four years (1809–1833), Herbart would remain in Königsberg, which would be the apex of his academic career.
For Herbart, the call from Königsberg was the fulfilment of a boyhood dream. Now he really would be the successor of the philosopher whom he had venerated since childhood! Such was the gist of the happy news he conveyed to Smidt in December 1808:
I am once again going to be a Prussian subject. Doubtless you will recall that we Göttingers were that once; then against our will. But now Krug in Königsberg has had the honor of being called to Leipzig … and so for me I now have the unexpected luck of getting that place that I so often dreamed of as a youth when I studied the works of the Königsberg sage! To be sure, in those days things stood differently with the Kantian philosophy and the Prussian monarchy; but in both there is still something that greatly attracts me … I will happily see it as a duty of the position to preserve the memory of Kant.108
After resigning from Göttingen, Herbart undertook the long journey to Königsberg in mid-March 1809. Along the way he stopped in Berlin to see Fichte, who, despite their disagreements, received his old student warmly, introducing him to the Prussian authorities as “a man of intelligence and many talents.”109 Herbart arrived in Königsberg by the middle of April, in plenty of time to celebrate Kant’s birthday, which was honoured every April 22 by Kant’s old “Tischgenossen”. Among the guests, Herbart, as Kant’s successor, now took a place of honour.
Just what the Kantian legacy meant to Herbart in these days is apparent from a speech he gave several years later on the occasion of Kant’s birthday.110 To assess Kant’s remarkable achievements, Herbart notes, we first have to place him in the context of his time. Philosophy in the period before Kant was devoted to the cause of enlightenment, to making philosophy popular for the general public, and it had ignored or neglected fundamental problems. Rather than thinking through problems, which challenge our ordinary intuitions and feelings, it would simply appeal to common sense and have done with the matter. Hume’s scepticism aroused more dumb astonishment than serious thinking. It was Kant’s great contribution, Herbart maintains, to have returned philosophy to its fundamental problems, to have made it take seriously once again scepticism and its challenges to our ordinary view of the world. Rather than fearing the direction and results of radical thinking, Kant would fearlessly investigate an issue regardless of the consequences. We must never underestimate, and we should forever cherish, Herbart thinks, the critical dimension of his philosophy, which insists that we constantly ask the questions: “How much do I know?” and “What is it that I know?” (64). But Kant’s critique went beyond a mere examination of previous philosophy, of this or that special system or school of thought; for it was first and foremost a critique of reason itself. This critique of reason is most apparent, Herbart maintains, in the antinomies, where Kant discovers the necessary contradictions in reason itself (65, 67). Herbart stresses that the antinomies are no mere sceptical trope, that they are not some easily resolvable puzzle or paradox. Rather, they are endemic to the very enterprise of metaphysics, which inevitably gets caught in contradictions whenever it thinks about the basic concepts of experience (67). Still, despite standing far above his own age, we must never forget, Herbart advises us, that Kant too was a child of his own time. As much as he did to overthrow the prejudices and dogmatism of his own day, he was still to some extent captive to them. For Herbart, this is especially apparent in Kant’s psychology, which still clung to the old faculty psychology. About that psychology, Herbart openly declares: “here I must confess frankly my regret that such a great mind had to be bound in such shackles!” (68)
Herbart’s early years in Königsberg are marked by two developments: his growing identification with Kant and his increasing alienation from the general direction of German philosophy.111 The two trends were tightly interwoven: Herbart saw Kant’s legacy as the bulwark and remedy against the excesses of contemporary German philosophy. That philosophy, as Herbart saw it, was dominated by his old nemesis, his erstwhile rival for Fichte’s attention and recognition: Schelling. There were, in his view, two corrupting forces behind Schelling’s influence. First, his formalism and a priori methodology, especially his tendency to explain everything by imposing some a priori conceptual scheme upon it. Rather than examining things for their own sake, Schelling began with general principles and described all facts in their terms. Second, his mysticism, a tendency deriving from appeals to intellectual intuition. Herbart expressed his misgivings about Schelling in a polemical essay, Ueber die Unangreifbarkeit der Schellingschen Lehre, which he published in 1813.112 Here Herbart declared that there was not much point in refuting Schelling’s philosophy, which was a task already performed by Fries and Köppen.113 The problem was not in refuting Schelling but in explaining why, despite such thorough refutations, Schelling’s philosophy still managed to persist as a corrupting force. Herbart’s chief explanation for the persistence of Schelling’s philosophy was its appeals to intellectual intuition. These were not only popular, because they avoided the need for hard thinking, but they were also irrefutable. Who could question an intellectual intuition if it was esoteric, the privilege of a talented elite? Herbart charges the Schellingians with dogmatism because they fail to ask basic questions about how they know their intuitions to be true. If the Schellingians only took to heart Kant’s call for criticism, they would never have dared to presume to be in possession of infallible intuitions. Herbart does not dispute that intuition is often a sound starting point in philosophy; but he insists that it cannot be the end point, because intuitions have to be refined and elaborated into concepts, judgements and inferences, which are indeed subject to criticism. Much of Herbart’s polemic in this piece is reminiscent of Kant’s famous essay Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Tone in der Philosophie, where Kant once railed against the esotericism and dogmatism of Platonic intellectual intuitions.114 Fighting the pretensions of mysticism was another score on which Herbart could identify with the Kantian legacy.
All Herbart’s alienation from contemporary German philosophy came to a head in a pamphlet he wrote in 1814, Ueber meinen Streit mit der Modephilosophie dieser Zeit.115 The pamphlet was an act of self-defence against two reviews of two of his recent books, his Allgemeine Pädagogik and his Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. Modephilosophie, it is not surprising, turns out be the philosophy of Schelling, whose corrupting influence Herbart detects in his anonymous reviewer. Laying aside all Herbart’s rhetoric and bluster against intellectual fashion, one fundamental philosophical issue emerges from his pamphlet. Namely, how are we to define philosophy? In his Lehrbuch Herbart defined philosophy as “the cultivation of concepts” (die Bearbeitung der Begriffe).116 The reviewer took exception to this because he felt that philosophy should deal straightaway with reality itself, not simply with our concepts of reality. Like a good Schellingian, he wanted the philosopher to grasp reality immediately through an intuition. Herbart’s response to this criticism reveals how much he prefers Kant’s legacy to the fashionable philosophy of his day:
It is a well known fact that, if there is to be knowledge for us, we know only through representations, and that in all philosophizing we deal immediately only with our representations. Whoever forgets this, and wants to jump right away into reality, lands in that old morass from which Kant with great effort rescued his contemporaries. (325)
Before this passage, Herbart provides a short statement of his own philosophical credo, where he makes it entirely plain that he accepts the basic principles of Kant’s transcendental idealism: that all our inner and outer intuitions are representations within us, and that they do not provide us with knowledge of things in themselves (320). If we put this statement in its context, namely Herbart’s opposition to Schelling, it becomes clear how much he opposed his own transcendental idealism to Schelling’s absolute idealism. While transcendental idealism is critical, not assuming that our representations of things directly reveal things themselves, absolute idealism is dogmatic, assuming that we have an immediate and direct grasp of reality in itself through intellectual intuition. This statement should be noted well by those scholars who classify Herbart as a realist and who assume he is opposed to transcendental idealism.
Now that we have placed Herbart in Kant’s chair in Königsberg, it seems that our story about his path to Kant might well come to a close. We have already taken stock of the deep Kantian dimension of his philosophy: his transcendental idealism, his critical conception of philosophy, his reformation of ethics through Kantian aesthetics. What more could we possibly add to make Herbart more Kantian? We might as well crown his head with Kant’s peruke! Yet there is one more factor to ponder in examining Herbart’s relationship to Kant, and we would be remiss not to consider it. This is Herbart’s psychology. It is here that Herbart’s relationship to Kant becomes especially fraught and critical. Herbart not only thinks Kant failed as a psychologist, but that the foundation of his philosophy has to be based on a new psychology. So, to have a completely balanced picture of that relationship, we need to know something about Herbart’s psychology.
Though Herbart’s later reputation rested mainly on his psychology, it was only in his Königsberg period that he fully devoted himself to the subject. Reflections on psychology were always an integral part of his early epistemological and pedagogical writings, so psychology was never far from his central concerns. Still, before Königsberg, Herbart wrote little specifically devoted to the subject. There is a short section on psychology in the Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik,117 though little more.
Herbart’s first systematic work on psychology is his Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, which first appeared in 1816.118 Although intended as only a compendium for his lectures, the Lehrbuch is still a historically significant text. It is here that Herbart first launched his attack on faculty psychology, which made him famous; and it is here that he first sketched the doctrines that he would put forward in his 1824 Psychologie als Wissenschaft, which is his major work on psychology. In some respects the Lehrbuch is the more revealing text, because it explains premises presupposed in the later work.
The preface and introduction to the Lehrbuch are very revealing about Herbart’s views on the method of psychology and its place in the sciences. We learn right away that psychology is not an independent empirical science but only one part of philosophy. Herbart indeed conceives of his textbook as part of a larger course preparing the student for philosophy. According to his classification of the sciences,119 psychology is a form of applied metaphysics, and only one of three such forms, along with physics and physiology. Still, psychology is the most important of these forms, and it is of special importance to philosophy in general. Why? This, Herbart explains, is for two reasons. First, because it is necessary to raise the psychological question of the possibility of knowledge; and second, because psychology has been used as a weapon in philosophy against all kinds of prejudices, though it is laden with prejudices itself. Both these points mean, Herbart concludes, that improving psychology is “a basic condition of correcting the errors in all parts of philosophy” (297).
Herbart thinks that the method of psychology should be, as far as possible, like that of the other empirical sciences. Namely, it should be what he calls “rational empirics”, that is, the method of deriving laws from observations, and then from these laws making predictions and further observations (§4; 304). Herbart’s psychology is intentionally naturalistic, attempting to explain the mind according to natural laws, so that it is part of the general fabric of nature. Hence he states that the goal of psychology should be to provide “a natural history of the mind” (303; §3 Anm. 2). On no account, however, does Herbart intend his psychology to be materialistic: subsumption under laws of nature does not mean for him subsumption under laws of matter. In any case, matter, true to his transcendental idealism, turns out to be nothing more than appearance (365; §114).
Despite prescribing a strict methodology, Herbart is not very sanguine about the prospects of following it. He warns us that we cannot expect “pure empirics” in psychology, that is, the possibility of describing experience just as given without the intrusion of prior thinking (302; §3).120 There is no such thing as pure data in psychology, pure facts independent of how we observe them; the mind is not like a lump of clay that exists independent of the sculptor who would form it.121 Self-observation often distorts the phenomena of consciousness, tears them out of context, and then surrenders them to general concepts (302–303; §3). Herbart flatly denies the classic Cartesian doctrine that inner experience enjoys any epistemic advantages or superiority over outer experience (305; §5). It is just as difficult to know ourselves through introspection as it is to know objects through the external senses. In his scruples about the methods of self-observation Herbart surpasses Fries and Beneke, who were much more naive and self-confident. Such are his doubts, however, that one wonders why he thinks psychology can be a science at all.
To some extent, Herbart addresses this problem. Despite the problems of self-observation, he still maintains that there are some prospects for success in psychology—provided that we make certain guiding assumptions. We must assume that mental life consists in particular events, that these events are in constant change, and that they are a manifold within one consciousness. We must also adopt as a working hypothesis that representations are forces whose activities are capable of measurement (306; §6). It is this hypothesis, Herbart thinks, that allows psychology to approach scientific status, because it alone permits a mathematical treatment of psychological phenomena. The ultimate justification of these guiding assumptions, he maintains, lies in metaphysics, whose task is to examine the presuppositions that make empirical psychology possible. So, though Herbart has modest hopes for psychology as an empirical science, he insists that it must have a metaphysical foundation. For these reasons he puts forward his psychology as little more than an “acceptable hypothesis” (306).
The antithesis of empirical psychology, the great obstacle to its realization, Herbart finds in the old faculty psychology, which he regards as a relic of scholasticism. Accordingly, the first part of the Lehrbuch is devoted to a thorough critique of the concept of a psychological faculty. The greatest damage to psychology occurs, he complains, when we pass from “what happens in us” to “powers that we have” (303; §3). The attribution of a faculty to similar mental phenomena he likens to a form of mythological thinking; it is as if there were a special animate force behind each kind of natural event, so that just as there is one god for thunder and lightening, another for rain and the harvest, so there is a distinct faculty for each kind of mental phenomena. On no account should we assume that the concept of a faculty is like that of a natural law, as if the faculty works always in specific ways under specific conditions; for the concept is always much too vague for that, applying under all kinds of different conditions.122 The very idea of a faculty is for Herbart a hypostasis, the reification of an abstract concept. We assume that there is some kind of thing lying behind the concept we use to refer to similar phenomena. Behind Herbart’s critique of mental faculties there lies a deep nominalism: “There are no general facts; the true psychological facts lie in the momentary states of the individual; and these are immeasurably far from the height of the general concept: man in general.” (310; §11). For this reason, Herbart will begin his own psychology with particular events alone, avoiding all commitment to general concepts not derived from facts.
One faculty theory in particular is the subject of Herbart’s wrath in the Lehrbuch: the tripartite theory that divides the soul into representing, desiring and feeling. This classification finds its locus classicus in Kant, and under his influence it had become very widespread in Herbart’s day. Herbart throws a battery of objections against it: that it is based on an incomplete induction; that its distinctions are not firm and clear, so that one phenomena falls under several headings; that it is impossible to regard these powers as separable, as if they could function apart from one another (310–312; §§13–15). The main problem with the theory, though, is that it tears apart the indivisible unity of the mind (311; §15).
Such was Herbart’s faith in the importance of psychology that he implicitly subordinates epistemology to psychology, as if there could no question of epistemology being a separate discipline on its own. One reason psychology is such a crucial discipline, he writes, is because of “the psychological question of the possibility of knowledge.” (297; my italics). The dependence of epistemology upon psychology becomes a prominent theme in the Lehrbuch, for here Herbart argues that epistemology will come closer to proper scientific status only through the work of empirical psychology. This point is driven home especially with regard to Kant, who becomes the foil for most of Herbart’s objections. We are told in no uncertain terms: “The foundations of Kantian philosophy, if they are to be tenable, must also be a rational empirics” (304). Kant has made all kinds of mistakes in epistemology due to his faulty psychology, namely, it is just false that people represent space as an infinite quantity, that substance and cause are universal principles for understanding experience in all stages of life and culture, that all people have implicit in their moral consciousness a categorical imperative, and so on (304–305; §4 Anm.). Herbart even says that, since Kant, psychology has gone backwards rather than forwards (307; §9 Anm.). Leibniz and Locke put psychology on a better foundation because they at least based it upon experience, whereas Wolff and Kant spoiled that promising beginning by making psychology into a scholastic discipline. Rather than relying on empirical observation, they followed an a priori method and simply presupposed, and constantly applied, the concept of a faculty. Kant was not only led astray by Wolff: he made things worse by attacking Wolff where he was most plausible, namely, in the idea of the mind as a substance. Instead of tearing apart Wolff’s intricate web of faculties, Kant drew it ever more tightly and finely. Herbart’s verdict on Kant’s psychology could not be more damning:
And so it came to pass that the Kantian doctrine was weakest where it should have been strongest. The critical weapons were sharpened with great finesse; but they were fashioned from a brittle metal which shattered with use, and which must be completely reforged. (308; §9 Anm.).
After his critique of faculty psychology in Part I of the Lehrbuch, Herbart turns to the exposition of his positive doctrine in Part II. The guiding assumption behind his psychology, as he now explains it, is that the mind consists in acts of self-preservation which express themselves as representations (364; §112). Herbart refuses to begin his psychology with the soul (Seele), which ex hypothesi does not exist anywhere or at any particular time, and which is therefore ultimately unknowable (363–364; §§109–111). His psychology will begin, true to his nominalist leanings, with nothing more than particular acts of self-preservation. It will not assume any subject in which these acts inhere, still less will it speculate about their source or origin (370; §125). That said, Herbart does think that he has a metaphysical justification for his guiding assumption: namely, his doctrine, expounded in the Hauptpuncte, that essence consists in power (Kraft), which consists in acts of self-preservation.123 We are reminded here, though Herbart does not explicitly mention it, of Leibniz’s theory of nisus, the striving of each monad towards representation.
We begin, then, with only representations, with acts of striving or self-preservation. These representations do not exist on their own, of course, but stand in relation to one another, which gives rise to a system of striving and counterstriving, action and reaction. Explicitly invoking a physical analogy, Herbart states that representations stand in relations of pressure and counterpressure to one another, just like forces in the physical world (364; §112). Representations are indeed forces themselves, standing in a system of mutual attraction and repulsion like physical forces. Herbart insists, however, that representations become powers (Kräfte) only through their relations to one another, and more specifically only when they resist one another (369; §124). None has a power in itself—for that would be only another hypostasis—but only in resisting other representations (370; §124). Each representation must both resist and yield to the pressure of other representations, without which tension it would cease to be a striving, and so even a representation (370; §125).
Assuming that each representation is a force, Herbart argues, permits us to ascribe to each a certain degree or quantity, which appears as its clarity or obscurity (370; §126). It is in virtue of this degree or quantity that we can measure the force of the representation, and so treat it mathematically. Herbart agrees with Kant that a discipline is a science only to the degree that it permits of mathematics; he disagrees with him, however, that psychology cannot permit mathematics. Once we understand representations as forces, we open the path to their measurement and so their scientific treatment.
Each representation consists in infinitely many smaller ones, or what Herbart calls “elementary apprehensions” (elementarischen Auffassungen), the analogue of Leibniz’s petit perceptions (384; §160). For them to make one representation they must fuse together and form one “Totalkraft”. Like Leibniz, Herbart thinks that most representations are subconscious, and that they come to consciousness only when the striving of a representation surmounts the resistance against it (372; §130). When a representation reaches a certain degree of strength, it reaches what Herbart calls “the threshold of consciousness” (Schwelle des Bewußtseins). There is, however, a limit to the strength of consciousness, Herbart thinks, since no representation is infinite in its strength (384; §159). Hence he proposes his law of decreasing receptivity: that the stronger a representation is, the less its strength increases (384; §159). When we add together all representations of sufficient strength to reach this threshold, we have consciousness itself, which just designates “the totality of all simultaneous actual representations” (372; §130 Anm.).
Having achieved such a reduction of the realm of consciousness to individual representations, Herbart then seems to re-introduce the soul through the backdoor, for we are told in no uncertain terms that “the unity of the soul” is the ground for the opposition of representations, for their forming a system within consciousness (374; §136). The same point is made later when Herbart insists that “the unity of the soul” is the source of the unity of our experience (401; §196 Anm.). The lingering presence of the soul in the background seems a relic of Herbart’s Kantian-Fichtean heritage, which scarcely coheres with his teaching elsewhere that representations by themselves form the unity of experience through their laws of interaction (399–400; §194).
Herbart ponders the objection that his psychology is too reductivist because it considers only the quantitative aspects of the mind, leaving aside its qualitative dimension (380–382; §§146–151). Since the qualitative aspect would involve feeling and desire, Herbart attempts to respond to the objection by proposing his own theory of feeling and desire. The soul is called the mind (Geist) insofar as it represents something; and it is called the spirit (Gemüth) insofar as it feels and desires (380; §146). Herbart then insists: “spirit has its place in the mind”. In other words, feeling and desire are functions of representation, and so they too are ultimately capable of quantitative treatment. Herbart explains that feeling and desire are really only specific kinds of representation (382; §151). Desire arises when a representation is driven forth yet held back, events that give rise to an unpleasant feeling, which is the source of desire (381; §149). Feeling occurs when a representation comes forth from its own power and is assisted by other forces so that it is strengthened (381–382; §150). It is ironic here how close Herbart comes to Wolff’s own theory of the mind as a vis representativae, the power of representation, of which desire and feeling are only aspects or functions. The Kantian tripartite theory, which has been the target of so much of Herbart’s criticism, grew out of the critique of this Wolffian theory, whose simple scheme, Kant argued, could not accommodate the specific functions of desire and feeling. It must be said that Herbart’s schematic treatment of this complicated topic is too simplistic, failing to address these Kantian objections.
Such are the basics of Herbart’s psychology as he first presented it in the Lehrbuch. The question remains, however, of its value and limits. Just how much did Herbart think he could explain of the mind according to his mathematical method? Though Herbart does not treat this question in the Lehrbuch itself, he turned to it more directly in a later essay, ‘Ueber die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit Mathematik auf Psychologie anzuwenden’.124 Here Herbart admits that mathematics is of no use in metaphysics (101), and that its use is limited to the realm of quantity. He denies, however, that the realm of the mind is qualitative alone. There is a broad quantitative dimension of psychic life, and it is just this which is amenable to mathematical treatment. This dimension includes the following: 1) the strength of each representation, namely, its degree of clarity or obscurity; 2) the degree of resistance between representations; 3) the degree of connection between representations and the number that are connected (102); 4) the length and duration of a series of representations; and 5) the speed or slowness in changes of representation (107). It is especially significant, Herbart notes, that representations fall into series of different kinds, for each of which we can provide precise equations (103). Yet Herbart admits that there is one fundamental aspect of mental life that his psychology cannot explain: namely, the content of the representations themselves (107). “What is represented,” he flatly concedes, “does not come into further consideration except insofar as their resistance or connection depends on it.” (107)125 This is, of course, a remarkable concession. For it means that Herbart’s psychology really cannot have the epistemological value and implications he promises; for epistemological issues concern first and foremost the content of representations, what they mean and whether they have a truth and reference.
So, though Herbart promised to put epistemology on a firm psychological basis, there is not much left of epistemology at all in his psychology. Least of all is there anything left of Kant’s epistemology. Throughout the Lehrbuch Herbart rejects one basic Kantian doctrine after another, all on the grounds that they are poor psychology. Rather than putting Kant’s epistemology on a new psychological foundation, as he promised, Herbart uses psychology to destroy it, piece by piece. He denies, for example, that the unity of our experience is the product of an act of synthesis, insisting instead that representations cohere with one another through their own inner force (318; §21). Unity is not a creation of the mind but it is a given of our experience, into which we later introduce distinctions (399, 400–401; §§194, 196). The whole idea of inner sense is dismissed summarily as an invention of psychologists, and as a rather poor invention at that because we know nothing about the specific representations it supplies or the law by which it operates (323; §32). The main assumption behind the metaphysical deduction—that all thinking is judging—is also questioned on the grounds that thinking does not necessarily involve speaking or the use of language (328; §40). Most striking of all, Herbart rejects the assumption that we have a faculty of understanding that consists in concepts (326; §37). Since there is no such thing as concepts, which are only abstractions, all that we can say in the end is that concepts are ideals to which our thinking should approximate (393–394; §§179–181). The whole idea of a priori powers and activities of the mind, which is so central to Kant’s problematic, collapses in the face of Herbart’s critique of psychological faculties. The mind does not consist in innate powers and faculties but only in the interconnections of representations, which are formed by their own activity.
Given Herbart’s trenchant critique of Kant’s psychology, and given that his psychology became by far the most influential aspect of his philosophy, it is hardly surprising that Herbart’s Kantianism has been overlooked. It is so hard to square Herbart’s mechanist and naturalist psychology with Kant’s transcendental philosophy that we have to forgive those who have stressed his opposition to Kant. And yet, as we have seen, apart from his psychology, Herbart was a deeply Kantian thinker, just as he said he was. His transcendental idealism, his critical conception of philosophy, his re-working of ethics according to Kantian aesthetics, his loyalty to the basic Kantian dualisms, all make him very Kantian. So it was with neither hyperbole nor irony that Herbart declared that October day in 1833 “Kantianum ipse me professus sum”. That was a public confession, coming from the heart, of his deepest philosophical convictions. They were the hard won result of his philosophical development from Jena to Königsberg, yet they were also there from the beginning in the little boy.
1 Here again the exception is Gerhard Lehmann, who devotes a chapter to Herbart in his Geschichte der nachkantischen Philosophie (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931), pp. 163–170.
2 The standard reading of Herbart is that he is a realist in a sense opposed to all idealism. Otto Flügel articulates this view when he writes in the very beginning of his book on Herbart: “Whoever knows only very little about Herbart still knows that he was a realist while his age mostly thought idealistically.” See his Herbarts Lehren und Leben, Zweite Auflage (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), p. 1. For a similar reading, see Walter Asmus, Herbart in seiner und in unserer Zeit (Essen: Neue deutsche Schule Verlagsgesellschaft, 1972), pp. 11–15. We will examine this interpretation in Sections 6 and 9 of this chapter; also see note 7 this Section.
3 Allgemeine Metaphysik (Königsberg: A.W. Unzer, 1828), p. xxvi. This work is reproduced in Volumes VII and VIII of the Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne, 1887–1912). All references to Herbart’s writings are to this edition, which is abbreviated as SW.
4 Oratio ad capessendam in academia georgia augusta professionem philosophiae ordinariam habita, SW X, 53–64. Cited p. 63.
5 Most notably in his critique of Schiller’s Anmut und Würde in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, Schriften VI, 23–24n.
6 All references in parentheses are to SW VII, first the page number, then the paragraph number (designated by the “§” sign). “Anm” indicates “Anmerkung” or remark.
7 In attributing transcendental idealism to Herbart I am going against the standard interpretation of his philosophy, which regards it as a realism opposed to all forms of idealism. See note 2 in this chapter. According to Otto Flügel, Herbarts Lehren und Leben, p. 1, Herbart rejected idealism, where “idealism” means the “denial or doubt of the reality of the external world”. Though Flügel is correct that Herbart disputes idealism in this sense, it is noteworthy that Kant himself does the same. Denial and doubt about the external world refer (respectively) to what Kant called dogmatic and sceptical idealism, both doctrines that he explicitly rejected in the first Kritik. On Kant’s criticisms of these doctrines, see my German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2002), pp. 75–131.
8 My aim here is not to provide a general introduction to Herbart’s philosophy, though one in English is sorely needed. I will not attempt to explain Herbart’s general metaphysics as it emerges from his Allgemeine Metaphysik, nor to explain his psychology as expounded in his 1824 Psychologie als Wissenschaft. Indisputably, these are Herbart’s chief works. However, any adequate study of them would take me far beyond my task here, the study of the origins of neo-Kantianism.
9 The chief study of Herbart’s intellectual development is that by Walter Asmus, Johann Friedrich Herbart. Eine pädagogische Biographie (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1968–70), 2 volumes. As the subtitle indicates, Asmus focuses upon the pedagogical aspects of Herbart’s thought and does not treat the development of his philosophy, which is our main concern here.
10 On Ültzen, see Asmus, Herbart, I, 307–308.
11 See the 1790 fragment ‘Etwas über die Lehre von der menschlichen Freiheit’, SW I, 359; and the 1789 fragment ‘Beweis für die Existenz eines ewigen Gottes’, SW XIX, 58–59.
12 SW I, 366.
13 ‘Etwas über die allgemeinsten Ursachen, welche in den Staaten den Wachstum und den Verfall der Moralität bewirken’, SW I, 351–361. This essay was Herbart’s first publication. It was published by his family friend G.A. von Halem in Blätter vermischten Inhalts (Oldenburg: J.F. Thiele, 1787), VI, 60–79.
14 In a review of F.E. Beneke’s Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten in the Jenaer Literatur-Zeitung 1822, Nr. 211–213. SW XII, 172.
15 See Herbart to Gerhard Anton von Halem, August 28, 1796: ‘Die Wissenschaftslehre machte, um für ihr unendliches Ich Platz zu gewinnen, eine unendliche Leere in Meinem Kopfe.’ SW XVI, 9.
16 See Herbart an Johann Smidt, January 23, 1796, SW XVI, 12; and Lantsch an Smidt, SW XVI, 22.
17 See Johann Georg Rist, Lebenserinnerungen, ed. G. Poel (Gotha: Perthes, 1880), I, 63. Also cited in SW XVI, 7.
18 On the Gesellschaft der freien Männer, see Asmus, Herbart, I, 75–87; and Willy Flitner, August Ludwig Hülsen und der Bund der freien Männer (Jena: Diedrich, 1913), pp. 1–18.
19 For a fascinating glimpse into these meetings, see Erich Fuchs, ‘Aus dem Tagebuch von Johann Smidt (1794/95)’, Fichte-Studien, VII (1995), 173–192.
20 See Herbart’s ‘Einige Bemerkungen über den Begriff des Ideals, in Rücksicht auf Rist’s Aufsatz über moralische und aesthetische Ideale’, SW I, 5–8; the Rist essay, ‘Über moralische und aesthetische Ideale’, appears in SW I, 362–365.
21 See Herbart to Johann Smidt, July 1, 1796, SW XVI, 28. Herbart was referring to Fichte’s Grundlage des gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Leipzig: Gabler, 1794).
22 See Herbart to Smidt, July 30, 1796, SW XVI, 31.
23 See Herbart to Smidt, September 1796, SW XVI, 37.
24 See Herbart to Smidt, December 1796, SW XVI, 42.
25 One manuscript, probably from 1794, attempts to answer Fichte’s question whether the concept of straightness is already involved in that of a line. See ‘Antwort auf des Herrn Professors Fichte Frage an die Mathematiker, die Natur der geraden und krummen Linie betreffend’, SW XIX, 65–68.
26 ‘Bemerkungen zu Fichte’s Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre’, SW I, 3–4.
27 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Leipzig: Gabler, 1794), p. 13.
28 Herbart to Smidt, December 1796, SW XVI, 9–11.
29 Herbart, ‘Spinoza und Schelling: eine Skizze’, SW I, 9–11.
30 Herbart, ‘Versuch einer Beurtheilung von Schelling’s Schrift: Ueber die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt’, SW I, 12–16.
31 F.W.J. Schelling, Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (Tübingen: Heerbrandt, 1795). In Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–1861), I, 85–112.
32 Herbart, ‘Ueber Schelling’s Schrift: Vom Ich, oder dem Unbedingten im menschlichen Wissen’, SW I, 17–33.
33 See the fourth lecture of Fichte’s 1794 Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten, in Werke VI, 323–334.
34 On Fichte’s encounters with Pestalozzi, see Xavier Léon, Fichte et son temps (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954), I, 211–214. Fichte met Pestalozzi in July 1793 through his wife Johanne Rahn, who was a friend of Pestalozzi’s wife.
35 See Steck an seine Mutter, March 28, 1797, SW I, 54–55.
36 On Hegel’s experience with the von Steiger family, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 45–58.
37 In a letter to an unknown addressee, written in Berne in September 4, 1799, Herbart lists among his reasons for leaving Berne that von Steiger has not given all that he has promised, and that he has asked more than the contract stipulates. See SW XIX, 116. On the whole, however, his experience seems to have been very positive, since he did not lose his respect for von Steiger and his affection for the children, to whom he wrote for many years thereafter.
38 See Herbart an v. Halem, January 28, 1798, SW XVI, 77.
39 See SW I, 84–95, 96–110.
40 See, for example, Georg Weiß, Herbart und seine Schule (Munich: Reinhardt, 1928), p. 14. See also Howard Dunkel’s article on Herbart in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan 1963), III, 481, which states that in his Swiss years Herbart had “worked out to a large extent the views which he was to refine and elaborate for the rest of his life”. Asmus’ position on this important point is not coherent. Without citing sufficient evidence, he maintains that Herbart had already achieved an independent standpoint from Fichte, in both principle and method, at the end of the Jena years. See Herbart I, 107. But he later states that Herbart had developed only “a few points” of his own philosophy at Enggistein (I, 132). Unfortunately, Asmus does not specify what these points are; nor does he discuss the Enggistein fragment in any detail. He cites a passage (I, 132) to show Herbart’s independence from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which is really only a citation from Reinhold. See SW I, 95. In the very text that Asmus cites, Herbart declares his dependence on Fichte’s method. See SW I, 94.
41 An von Halem, January 1798, SW XVI, 77.
42 An meine Eltern, June 1798, SW XVI, 84.
43 An Muhrbeck, October 28, 1798, XVI, 96.
44 SW XVI, 99. The letter is undated, though it must have been written in November 1798, after Böhlendorff’s letter to Rist on November 10.
45 See Böhlendorff an Rist, November 10, 1798, SW XVI, 97–98.
46 An Muhrbeck, October 28, 1798, SW XVI, 95.
47 This writing was Fichte’s defence against the charge of atheism. See Appellation an das Publicum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, in Fichte, Sämtliche Werke V, 193–238. I have not been able to determine from Herbart’s correspondence what were his objections against Fichte’s book.
48 This is the upshot of a letter of Horn to Smidt, March 31, 1799, SW XVI, 102. The first exchange of letters between Herbart and Fichte on this episode is apparently lost. See also Böhlendorff to Herbart, July 30, 1799, XIX, 115–116.
49 See Herbart to Fichte, March 24, 1799, SW XVI, 101.
50 See Herbart to Smidt, Early December, 1796, SW XVI, 43.
51 See her remarkably candid letter to Fichte written in the night of October 12/13, 1797, in Asmus, Herbart I, 147–148.
52 See his letter to his parents, June 1798, SW I, 82–91.
53 See L. Otth an Herbart, June 10, 1799, SW XIX, 113–115.
54 See Weiß, Herbart, p. 15.
55 Herbart, SW I, 113–114.
56 Herbart, ‘Über das Bedürfnis der Sittenlehre und Religion in ihrem Verhältnis zur Philosophie’, SW I, 116–126.
57 These writings comprise essays, lectures and a book. The essays are ‘Ideen zu einem pädagogischen Lehrplan für höhere Studien’ (SW I, 129–135), which appeared in 1801, and ‘Über Pestalozzi’s neueste Schrift: Wie Gertrud Ihre Kinder Lehrte’ (SW I, 137–150), which was published in 1802. The lectures are ‘Zwei Vorlesungen über Pädagogik’ (SW I, 279–290), and ‘Über den Standpunkt der Beurteilung der Pestalozzischen Unterrichtsmethode’ (SW I, 301–309), both delivered in 1804, and therefore after the Bremen years. The book is Pestalozzis Idee eines ABC der Anschauung (SW I, 151–274), which first appeared in 1802.
58 For introductions in English, see Charles de Garmo, Herbart and the Herbartians (New York: Scribner, 1896), and Ossian Lang, Outlines of Herbart’s Pedagogics (Chicago, IL: Kellogg & Co., 1894).
59 This important generational shift was first thematized by Dilthey. See his Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels, in Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Tuebner, 1921), IV, 43–60.
60 This theme of Herbart’s appears in the circle of his friends by 1797. See Erich von Berger and Hülsen to Herbart, January 11, 1797: “Alle Philosophie als Thätigkeit des Geistes betrachtet … ist Versuch die Welt anzuschauen.” SW XIX, 86.
61 Herbart, SW I, 259–274. Though the second edition appeared in 1804, Herbart described the essay as “ein Fragment aus einem älteren Aufsatze, der ursprünglich zur Verständigung mit einem Freund geschrieben wurde”, SW I, 256. Since the friend was probably Smidt, and since Herbart stood in closest contact with him in Bremen, it is safe to attribute the essay to the Bremen years.
62 See Herbart an Gries, end of July 1802, SW XVI, 253–254.
63 See Herbart’s ‘Meldeschreiben zur Promotion und Habilitation’, SW I, 366. This is undated, but would have been submitted no later than the theses, which were submitted July 1802, SW I, 275.
64 See Herbart, ‘Thesen zur Promotion und Habilitation’, SW I, 275–278.
65 For a German translation of the theses, see Asmus, Herbart, I, 345, 346–347.
66 Asmus, Herbart I, 206.
67 For his dissertation Herbart submitted his first book, Pestalozzis Idee eines ABC der Anschauung, which appeared in 1802, shortly after the disputation. See Asmus, Herbart I, 209.
68 Ioanne Friderico Herbart, De platonici systematis fundamento commentatio (Göttingen: Roewer, 1805). The text is reprinted in SW I, 311–332.
69 The appendix or ‘Beylage’ appears in SW I, 327–332. Böckh, who reviewed the dissertation, called the ‘Beylage’ “a dangling rag” (ein angeflickter Lappen), though it is crucial for understanding Herbart’s intentions.
70 See Fichte’s 1800 Bestimmung des Menschen, Werke II, 299–319; and Schelling’s 1802 Bruno, Werke I/4, 226–230.
71 My task here is not to summarize the central theses of Herbart’s lecture but only to focus on those aspects relevant to his critique of contemporary philosophy. Herbart provided his own summary in his ‘Selbstanzeige’, which appears in SW I, 333–334. The lecture was reviewed by no less than August Böckh in the Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 1808, pp. 561–571, reprinted in SW I, 334–342. Herbart replied to Böckh’s review in the Neuen Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung 1808, No. 43, pp. 673ff, also reprinted in SW I, 342–348.
72 See Kant, Prolegomena, IV, 374.
73 Herbart, Kurze Darstellung eines Plans zu philosophischen Vorlesungen (Göttingen: Röwer, 1804). SW I, 291–299.
74 Kant, Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbjahre von 1765–1766 (Königsberg: Kanter, 1765). Schriften II, 303–313.
75 Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik (Göttingen: J.C. Baier, 1806). A second edition, published with Danckwerts, appeared in 1808. All references above are to the first edition as reprinted in SW II, 175–226.
76 See Herbart to Carl von Steiger, August 23, 1806, SW XVI, 296.
77 Entwurf zu Vorlesungen über die Einleitung in die Philosophie, SW II, 297–327.
78 See too Herbart’s definition in the ‘Praenoscenda Generaliora’ to his Theoriae de Attractione Elementorum Principia Metaphysica where metaphysics is defined as “ars experientian recte intelligendi”. See SW III, 160, §1.
79 See Section 5 in this chapter.
80 Herbart refers to Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Schriften IV, 408. His citation is selective but accurate.
81 Hegel’s dialectic makes its first formal and official appearance in 1807 in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Arguably, Hegel had the idea much earlier, since its rudiments already appear in his 1801 Differenzschrift. See the section entitled ‘Reflexion als Instrument des Philosophierens’, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, eds Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) II, 25–30. However, there is no question of a direct influence of Hegel on Herbart, or conversely, since the two philosophers were never in the same place at the same time, and their chief metaphysical writings appear almost simultaneously. It is noteworthy that in his later years Herbart took note of Hegel’s dialectic, and that he was more sympathetic to it than other neo-Kantians, especially Fries. In his Kurze Enzyklopädie der Philosophie, which appeared in 1831, he stated that the contradictions of Hegel’s logic have their basis in experience itself. “Der Kern seiner Logik ist die Erfahrung selbst.” See SW IV, 215.
82 G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Kraft und Verstand’, System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bamburg: Goebhardt, 1807), pp. 59–100.
83 See Section 10 in this chapter.
84 Johann Friedrich Herbart, Allgemeine Pädagogik (Göttingen: Röwer, 1806), SW II, 1–139.
85 Johann Friedrich Herbart, Ueber philosophisches Studium (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1807). All references in parentheses are to SW, II, 227–296.
86 See F.W.J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (Tübingen: Cotta, 1803). In Schelling, Sämtliche Werke V, 211–352. Schelling lectures were originally given in the Summer Semester of 1802 at the University of Jena.
87 Herbart admits its Fichtean provenance in his ‘Über philosophisches Wissen und philosophisches Studium’, SW I, 94. Just how his method follows and differs from Fichte’s is a complicated matter that we cannot explore here.
88 Cf. Ueber philosophsiches Studium, SW II, 273 and Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik, SW II, 181–182.
89 Herbart, SW II, 333–354. It is worthwhile supplementing the introduction with Herbart’s handwritten remarks on the text, which appear in SW II, 464–470.
90 See Herbart’s ‘Rede, gehalten an Kants Geburtstage, den 22 April’, in SW III, 69.
91 See Kant’s ‘Erklärung gegen Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre’, Schriften XII, 370–371.
92 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Schriften IV, 432.
93 Herbart does not explicitly reject the categorical imperative as a criterion of morality in the introduction to the Allgemeine praktische Philosophie; however, in the handwritten remarks he states that Kant’s attempt to make the mere form of the law into the criterion of morality naively assumes that an immoral will will attempt to make an exception for itself. See SW II, 477.
94 As we have seen in Section 4 of this chapter, Herbart does provide something of an argument in his earlier essay ‘Ueber die ästhetische Darstellung der Welt’. There he argues that the source of obligation cannot be practical or theoretical and therefore has to be aesthetic as the only remaining alternative. See SW I, 264. Herbart does not repeat or refer to this argument in the Allgemeine praktische Philosophie.
95 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §2, V, 204.
96 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §4, V, 207; §5, V, 210.
97 Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Schriften IV, 449–450. The translation above is taken from Herbart’s inaccurate citation of Kant.
98 In the handwritten remarks to Allgemeine praktische Philosophie, SW II, 479–480.
99 In sections §27 (V, 257–259) and §28 (V, 261) of the Kritik der Urteilskraft Kant explains that the pleasure we take in the sublime arises from our awareness of our moral powers transcending the world of sense. In section §59 (V, 362) he famously states that beauty is a symbol of the morally good.
100 Herbart, SW II, 478.
101 The phrase is redolent of the moral sense school. In a reply to a review of his book, however, Herbart distanced himself from that school. See SW II, 514.
102 Herbart, ‘Wiefern kann der praktische Philosophie Allgemeinheit zukommen?’, SW II, 349–354.
103 The introduction of intellectual intuition here is still consistent with Herbart’s disputation thesis “Intellectualis intuitio nulla est” (SW I, 278). The intellectual intuition he forbids is the Schellingian kind whose object is the “An-sich”, that is, the universal substance or absolute. The intellectual intuition he permits is the intuition of practical ideas.
104 See Herbart to Smidt, January 17, 1808, SW XVII, 3.
105 See Herbart to von Halen, July 1808, SW XVII, 10; and Herbart to Carl von Steiger, April 1808, SW XVII, 6.
106 See Herbart to Smidt, February 15, 1808, SW XVII, 6.
107 All the documents surrounding Herbart’s appointment are in SW XIV, 1–20.
108 Herbart, SW XVII, 28.
109 See Fichte to Karl Freiherr von Altenstein, April 2, 1809, in J.G. Fichte, Briefwechsel, ed. Hans Schulz (Leipzig: Haessel, 1930) II, 530–531; and Fichte to Friedrich Stägemann, April 2, 1809, Fichte, Briefwechsel, II, 531–532.
110 ‘Rede, gehalten an Kants Geburtstage, den 22 April, 1810’, SW III, 59–71. The speech was first published in the Königsberger Archiv, 1812.
111 He expressed this alienation shortly before going to Königsberg. See his November 1808 letter to C.L. Reinhold, SW XVII, 23.
112 Herbart, Ueber die Unangreifbarkeit der Schellingschen Lehre (Königsberg: Degen, 1813). In SW III, 241–258.
113 This piece stands in marked contrast to Herbart’s early essays on Schelling when he praised Schelling’s writings as expositions of idealism. Disingenuously, Herbart tells his audience that he never bothered to write against Schelling (III, 252).
114 Kant, Schriften VIII, 387–406.
115 Herbart, Ueber meinen Streit mit der Modephilosophie dieser Zeit (Königsberg: Unzer, 1814). SW III, 311–352.
116 Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, §4, SW IV, 38–39.
117 See Herbart, Hauptpuncte der Metaphysik, §13, ‘Elemente einer künftige Psychologie’, SW II, 210–215.
118 Johann Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unzer, 1816). SW IV, 295–436. All references in parentheses are to the edition in SW. The first number is to the page, the second to the paragraph, indicated by the ‘§’ sign. ‘Anm.’ designates ‘Anmerkung’, a remark appended to a paragraph.
119 For this classification, see the ‘Encyklopädische Uebersicht der Psychologie und Naturphilosophie’, in the Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, SW IV, 233, §134 and IV, 264, §140.
120 See ‘Herbart’s handschriftlich Bemerkungen in seinem Handexemplar des Lehrbuchs zur Psychologie’, Anhang 2, SW IV, 614.
121 See ‘Herbart’s handschriftlich Bemerkungen’, Anhang 2, SW IV, 617.
122 See ‘Herbart’s handschriftlich Bemerkungen’, Anhang 2, SW IV, 615–616.
123 See Part I, Chapter 2, Section 6.
124 Herbart, SW V, 91–122.
125 Herbart made the same concession in his Psychologie als Wissenschaft, SW VI, 125; §123. See also Herbart’s Ueber meinen Streit mit der Modephilosophie, SW III, 326–327, where he clearly separates logic and psychology, insisting that logic has nothing to do with psychology and that its results concern the content of thought quite independently of how we happen to think.