Of all the neo-Kantian thinkers who came of age in the 1860s the least known has been Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829–1897). Though much neglected in comparison with Fischer, Zeller, Liebmann and Lange, Meyer played a major role in the Kant revival of the 1860s. His early articles on the materialism controversy were some of the most subtle and sophisticated, and his main contribution to it, his 1856 Zum Streit über Leib und Seele, appeared years before the pro-Kantian manifestos of Fischer, Zeller and Liebmann. In the 1870s Meyer was a major player in the neo-Kantian discussions of Schopenhauer and Darwin.1 Two of his books occupy a worthy place in the neo-Kantian tradition. His Kant’s Psychologismus was one of the last and best statements of the psychologistic interpretation of Kant; and his Zeitfragen was one of the first and finest attempts to sketch a neo-Kantian worldview. Last but not least, Meyer was the first neo-Kantian to consider the issues posed by the philosophy of history, issues that will preoccupy the Southwestern school only decades later.
Meyer’s importance for the neo-Kantian movement was first fully recognized by Klaus Christian Köhnke.2 Though Köhnke’s discussion is brief, limited to Meyer’s early articles on the materialism controversy, it is an important step in the right direction. Here, following in Köhnke’s footsteps, we will take the opportunity to take a broader and closer look at this important but neglected figure.
It is a token of Meyer’s obscurity that little is known about his life. Fortunately, the main facts are well-established and easily told.3
Jürgen Bona Meyer was born October 25, 1829, in Hamburg, the son of a wealthy businessman. As a youth he went to the famous Hamburg Gymnasium Johanneum from 1842 to 1849. In the autumn of 1849, he enrolled at the University of Bonn to study medicine and natural science, a training that later benefited him in discussing Darwinism. Gradually, Meyer gravitated towards philosophy, and in 1851 migrated to Berlin to study it. There he worked with Trendelenburg, writing a dissertation on Aristotle’s biology, De principiis Aristotelis in distributione animalium adhibitis. On the basis of his dissertation he then wrote a larger book, Aristoteles Thierkunde,4 which appeared in 1855. Meyer also did work on the Index Aristotelicum of the Berlin Academy of Science,5 for which he wrote the entries on Aristotle’s natural philosophy. During his early Berlin years, then, Meyer seemed well on the road towards becoming a classical scholar, a career which Trendelenburg encouraged him to follow.6 But Meyer had different plans for himself, eager to pursue broader and more contemporary interests.
After the completion of his studies in Berlin, Meyer went to Paris in 1855, undertaking studies for a history of recent philosophy in France. Nothing came of the history; but the stay in France had a major impact on his philosophical thinking. There he acquired a command of French and he learned to appreciate classical French thinkers, most notably Voltaire and Rousseau.7 His knowledge of French philosophy will emerge in many of his later writings, giving them a wider international perspective.
Later in 1855 Meyer returned to Hamburg, and, suffering the fate of Fries, Herbart and Fischer before him, became a private tutor. The image of neo-Kantians as sequestered academics is least accurate in the case of Meyer, who was socially and politically active all his life. Upon his return from France, he threw himself into the civic life of Hamburg, engaging in work to establish an art museum, a Schiller memorial, a Volksbibliothek, and a school of higher education for businessmen. He also became a co-editor of the Hamburgische Volksblatt. Economic insecurity eventually drove Meyer to find a more settled academic career.8 In 1862 he habilitated in Berlin, becoming a Privatdozent there. He found a position teaching philosophy at the Kriegsakademie; and when Trendelenburg resigned his role on the committee to examine teachers for the public school system, Meyer took his place. By the mid-1860s, then, Meyer’s career was truly established. By the late 1860s he was considered for professorships in Marburg and Kiel.9
In 1868 Meyer was made ordinary professor in Bonn, taking over the position in classical philosophy once occupied by Christian August Brandis. For his Einladungsschrift he submitted a piece on not classical philosophy but Kant’s psychology.10 Meyer would stay in Bonn for the rest of his career. He proved to be a popular teacher, appreciated for his devotion to his students. In 1887 Meyer became a pillar of the establishment, the rector of Bonn University. Just as in Hamburg, he was active in social and political affairs, making it his special calling to promote Volksbildung in the Rheinland. He played a major part in founding the Verband der Bildungsvereins Rheinlands and a leading role in the Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung von Volksbildung. Given these interests, it is not surprising that many of Meyer’s publications are devoted to education.11 Such was his fame as an educator that in 1877–1878 Meyer became one of the teachers of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia.
In his later years Meyer’s philosophical views underwent a shift away from Kantian dualism and towards monism. He planned to write a book explaining his new position, but in 1895 he suffered a severe stroke; in the next years he progressively weakened. He died on June 22, 1897 in Bonn.
The chief hallmark of Meyer’s neo-Kantianism was his emphasis on the critical, non-metaphysical dimension of Kant’s philosophy. Meyer maintained that the critical philosophy is not a metaphysics, that it is not a species of idealism in conflict with materialism; rather, its critical concerns with the limits of knowledge mean that it stands above the dispute between idealism and materialism. He stressed that transcendental idealism is essentially critical idealism, that is, it sticks closely to the limits of knowledge and forbears from all metaphysical claims about the nature of reality in itself.
Like all the neo-Kantians of the 1860s, Meyer was an advocate of the psychological approach to Kant founded by Fries and developed by Helmholtz. He has none of the growing doubts about this approach that we find sometimes in Fischer and Liebmann. Though no disciple of Fries, Meyer found the Friesian approach to Kant’s transcendental philosophy to be the most plausible and promising.12 He would advocate a neo-Friesian psychologism as late as 1869 in his Kant’s Psychologie. Remarkably, Meyer did not adopt Helmholtz’s more physiological approach to Kant, and he did not fully appreciate Helmholtz’s critique of Fries’ introspective methods.
It has been wisely said of Meyer’s intellectual ambitions: “His ideal was to revive the cultural aspirations of the age of enlightenment from the higher standpoint of the 19th century, to bring together science and the education of the people.”13 Meyer was indeed a 19th-century Aufklärer. This was the spirit behind all his pedagogical work as well as his philosophy. Placing himself in the Enlightenment tradition of Kant and Voltaire, he advocated the classical liberal ideals of toleration, freedom of conscience, separation of church and state; he was intent on Enlightenment in the classical 18th-century sense, which meant breaking down the barriers between theory and practice and making science better known among the public. We shall soon see how these ideals shaped even his neo-Kantian perspective.
Like so many neo-Kantians, the crucible for the formation of Meyer’s philosophical views was the materialism controversy of the 1850s. As a participant in the fateful 31st meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze in Göttingen in autumn 1854, Meyer was an eyewitness at the very beginning of the dispute. There he heard Rudolph Wagner’s notorious speech about the dangers of materialism, and he listened to the many heated discussions arising from it.14 While fully appreciating the importance of the issues, Meyer was astonished by the handling of the dispute. It was filled with rancour, dogmatism and intolerance, with one party denouncing the other for immorality. Wagner’s self-righteousness disgusted him as much as Vogt’s arrogance. Both parties to the dispute claimed to know so much, though it was evident they knew so little. The whole proceedings reminded him of nothing more than the metaphysical disputes among the earthling philosophers in Voltaire’s Micromegas.15 Following Voltaire’s example, Meyer would cultivate a sceptical detachment about such disputes. Out of disaffection with the intolerance and dogmatism of the materialism controversy came Meyer’s sceptical neo-Kantianism.
Meyer’s neo-Kantianism had a very different motivation from that of Fischer or Zeller. Although Meyer too was worried about the imminent obsolescence of philosophy, his chief concern was a very different one: the interminable and undecidable disputes of metaphysics. Meyer saw the raging dispute between idealism and materialism about the essence of life, which arose in the wake of the materialism controversy, as beyond solution by rational means. The great merit of the critical philosophy, he believed, is that it could stand above this dispute and show it to be irresolvable. So, for Meyer, the rehabilitation of Kant’s philosophy was very much a matter of restoring its critical role and stature, of rehabilitating the old critical task of setting limits to metaphysics. Just as Kant had found the critical philosophy to settle the disputes of metaphysics in the 18th century, so Meyer would re-found it for the same reason in the 19th century.
Meyer stated the essence of his position in a series of lectures he gave in Hamburg in 1856, which were published as Zum Streit über Leib und Seele.16 The book was widely read and reviewed. Meyer responded to his critics, and gave a further explanation and defence of his position, in two series of articles, one appearing from 1856 to 1857 in the Deutsches Museum,17 the other from 1860 to 1861 in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik.18
In both his lectures and articles Meyer presents Kant’s philosophy as a neutral critical standpoint in the disputes between idealism and materialism. The central task of the critical philosophy is to determine the limits of reason and to show how the disputes of metaphysics are undecidable because they transcend these limits. On Meyer’s reading, the critical philosophy is intended to be neither a refutation of materialism nor a demonstration of idealism. Both materialism and idealism are metaphysical theories, which are indemonstrable because they speculate about reality in itself, and therefore transcend the limits of possible experience. Although neither theory is demonstrable, neither is refutable, and so both stand as hypotheses about things-in-themselves. On theoretical grounds, then, the critical philosophy makes no decision between idealism and materialism; it simply points out that the dispute between them is undecidable because it goes beyond the limits of reason.
The bulk of Meyer’s Zum Streit über Leib und Seele is devoted to showing why the demonstrations and refutations of materialism and idealism fall short and leave unresolved the major question about the essence of life and mind. Meyer first considers the materialism put forward by Czolbe, Moleschott, Büchner and Vogt.19 They attempt to demonstrate that life and consciousness are fully explicable from the basic laws governing matter. Like the classical materialists, Epicurus and Democritus, they assume that life and consciousness arise from the combinations of material particles, though they now have all the tools and data of modern chemistry to help them formulate their hypotheses. The crucial question for materialism, Meyer argues, is how and why just these combinations of particles arise to produce life. Vogt leaves it to chance, making the origin of life seem like a miracle; but Czolbe and Büchner insist that these particles come together from the necessity of natural laws, which they fail to specify. The problem is that these laws work only under complicated specific initial conditions, and then the question arises why all these conditions come together in the first place (35). The idealist can admit that life and consciousness arise from combinations of atoms; but he will insist that this explanation is still not sufficient because we need some plan, purpose or ideal to explain why just these combinations come together (54–55). While the materialist attempts to explain life and consciousness on the basis of the chemical interactions between particles, the idealist maintains that a complete explanation involves reference to some plan, purpose or ideal. The idealism that Meyer considers in his lectures is what he calls an “objective idealism”, whose defining thesis is that all reality conforms to some idea, plan or purpose (55). Within that general thesis, Meyer distinguishes many variations and sub-variations, devoting a lecture to each kind. Here we note only his main objections to two major kinds of such objective idealism. One form is dualistic, holding that mind and body are distinct substances; the other is monistic, holding that mind and body are essentially one and the same thing. Meyer objects to the dualistic version on the classical grounds: it cannot explain the interaction between such distinct substances (75). He disputes the monistic version because it cannot explain how one and the same substance gives rise to such distinct appearances or manifestations (95). Meyer pays special attention to Lotze’s spiritualist version of idealism, according to which the essence of all reality consists in spirit (73–74, 87–88). This does not really resolve the problem of mental–physical interaction, he argues, but only throws the problem back another step: Why is it that spirit creates a world that appears in space?
For Meyer, the diagnosis of the failures of materialism and idealism is simple. Both are attempts to explain the inexplicable, to conceive the inconceivable. Both push their explanations beyond possible experience, and so transcend the limits of reason. There is no point in appealing to any particular facts as a final demonstration or refutation of one view or the other, because both views have their own interpretations for all the facts (100, 103). The chief problem for materialism is that it cannot explain why the laws of chemistry come together in just this complicated way to produce life and consciousness; the main difficulty for idealism is how ideas, plans or purposes, which do not exist in themselves, act upon and come to existence in the material world. Before these problems, Meyer advises nothing less than modesty and restraint. We can speculate about these problems all we want, but we must refrain from dogmatic claims that we alone have the solution for them, and that other positions are wrong. Above all, we must have tolerance for the views of others. One of the worst aspects of the dispute between materialism and idealism, Meyer believes, is its intolerance, because each party accuses the other of undermining morals or religion. But such metaphysical views have no moral implications: the materialist can still be virtuous, and the idealist can still value life on this earth.
Although Meyer maintains that there cannot be any decision between idealism and materialism on theoretical grounds, he still states his personal preference for idealism (122). He accepts the common view that mind and body are distinct substances that somehow come together in some incomprehensible way. Whenever we cannot settle an issue by theoretical means, we are allowed such personal preferences, though we have to admit they have no theoretical worth whatsoever. It was one of the great merits of Kant’s philosophy, Meyer contends, that it left a space open for personal belief after showing the limits of reason. The model for his own declaration of idealism came from Kant’s Träume eines Geistersehers, where Kant, after exposing the limits of all metaphysics, states his preference for idealism on the grounds that it gives us the hope of immorality.20
Now that we have sketched Meyer’s general position, we should ask ourselves if it is a faithful interpretation of Kant. His interpretation raises issues of general importance. One of these concerns the critical versus metaphysical dimension of Kant’s philosophy: Is Kant’s philosophy entirely critical and non-metaphysical? Or does it have metaphysical commitments of its own?
There is some strong textual evidence for Meyer’s interpretation. Not the least of its advantages is that it takes seriously Kant’s description of his position as “critical idealism”.21 Transcendental idealism is supposedly critical in the sense that it is an idealism about the limits of our knowledge and not a theory about the essence of the world. The defining feature of transcendental idealism is indeed its distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, where the realm of appearances circumscribes the limits of the knowable and where things-in-themselves are beyond those limits. While Kant does see transcendental idealism as a corrective to materialism, that is arguably only because materialism claims knowledge of things-in-themselves; he does not claim to refute materialism itself because he states, in a passage duly cited by Meyer, that the soul could have, for all we know, a material substrate (A 360). Another strength of Meyer’s interpretation is that it takes into account Kant’s statement that the critical philosophy is a middle path between “a soulless materialism” and “a groundless spiritualism” (B 421). The natural reading of such a description, which Meyer adopts, is that both materialism and spiritualism are forms of dogmatism because they claim a knowledge of reality in itself. This reading seems to follow from Kant’s statement that the critical philosophy criticizes the grounds of proof for propositions rather than the propositions themselves (A 384, 388–389). This agrees exactly with Meyer’s view that the critical philosophy does not attack the central theses of materialism or idealism but only their demonstrations.
Despite such evidence, Meyer’s interpretation is problematic because there is also compelling textual evidence against it. It faces two major difficulties. The first problem is that Kant is not really as neutral in the dispute between spiritualism and materialism as he seems to suggest, because Kant proudly maintains that the critical philosophy establishes the falsity of materialism. So it is not simply that materialism fails to demonstrate its central thesis. Kant gives two reasons for the falsity of materialism. 1) Transcendental idealism shows that matter consists in nothing more than representations. If we were to take away the thinking subject, Kant argues, the whole corporeal world would disappear (A 383, 387). We assume that matter exists independent of our representations, he maintains, only because we hypostasize these representations, as if they were entities existing independent of us (A 385, 386, 391). 2) Apperception shows that I am simple, and so cannot be in space, where every object is composite (B 420). “If matter were a thing-in-itself,” Kant argues, “then as a composite being it would be completely distinguished from the soul as a simple being.” (A 359) The second major difficulty of Meyer’s interpretation is that Kant does claim to resolve the metaphysical dispute about the interaction between mind and body. In the section ‘Observation on the Sum of the Pure Doctrine of the Soul’, which concludes the first edition version of the Paralogisms, Kant claims that the mind–body problem is resolvable on the premises of his transcendental idealism. Since transcendental idealism makes matter into “nothing more than a mere form, or a certain mode of representation”, there can be some interaction between mind and body, which now consists in only different forms of representation, inner and outer (A 385–386). On Kant’s reading, mind and body are not heterogeneous substances but only different forms of representation that fall under common general laws of experience. Whatever one makes of Kant’s resolution of this problem, it is in striking contrast with Meyer’s interpretation, according to which the problem of mental–physical interaction is completely irresolvable on Kantian principles.22
Meyer could say in his own defence that, though Kant indeed intends to demonstrate the falsity of materialism, this is not the proper logical consequence of his own position. There is a gap between Kant’s intention and his arguments because all that Kant shows in the Transcendental Aesthetic is that space and time are a priori intuitions arising from the spontaneity of our forms of perception; but that still leaves open the possibility that these intuitions correspond to reality in itself, which also happens to be spatial. Meyer, in other words, still had the option of affirming the Trendelenburgian “third possibility”, according to which space and time are a priori intuitions but also correspond with reality in itself. It is striking, however, that Meyer himself did not exploit this strategy. Remarkably, in the famous dispute between Trendelenburg and Fischer, Meyer took sides against his former teacher! In his ‘Ueber den Kriticismus’, he stated his express agreement with Fischer and argued that appearances have no objective status beyond representational states.23 The price of such disloyalty was that Meyer’s interpretation of Kant was harder to defend.
Another general issue raised by Meyer’s interpretation concerns the realm of faith and what one should allow within it. Although Kant had famously denied knowledge to make room for faith, the kind of faith he wanted to save was still a rational faith, that is, one based on the universal and necessary imperatives of morality, which are ultimately based on reason. Kant had no intention of saving purely personal faith, beliefs that stemmed from one’s individual choice and personality. For him that would have been to open a floodgate for all kinds of idiosyncrasy and enthusiasm. Meyer, however, had a completely opposing conception of the realm of faith. What Kant wanted to prevent Meyer wanted to permit, indeed encourage. It was the chief advantage of his version of criticism, he proclaimed, that “it would open the floodgates for subjective opining and believing” (v). For Meyer, the great value of the Kantian restrictions on reason is that they create a realm where personal and individual choice can roam and play.
Behind Meyer’s liberal conception of the realm of faith were his criticisms of Kant’s own doctrine of rational faith, that is, the attempt to provide a practical proof for the beliefs in the existence of God and immortality. Since Meyer saw demonstration as co-extensive with the realm of theoretical reason, he could see no possibility of providing a practical demonstration of these beliefs.24 He agreed with those critics of Kant who suspected that this doctrine re-introduced metaphysics through the back door of practical reason. Meyer’s own conception of the space of practical reason allowed no demonstrations at all, and therefore no universal or necessary prescriptions. The space of practical reason was a sphere of freedom, where individual choice alone reigned. Such “subjectivism”, Meyer maintained, is “the only possible completion of criticism”.25
Meyer’s chief work dealing specifically with issues of Kant scholarship was his Kant’s Psychologie, which appeared in 1870.26 This book was “the last great hurrah” of the psychological interpretation of Kant, the final work in the tradition beginning with Fries in the late 18th century. That tradition was coming under increasing criticism in the 1860s, against which Meyer was fighting a rear guard action. Already by the early 1870s the tide would turn against his interpretation with Cohen’s and Windelband’s new epistemological readings of transcendental philosophy.27
Meyer poses three questions concerning Kant’s psychology: 1) What is the role of psychology in Kant’s transcendental philosophy? 2) How do we know the a priori? and 3) Why did Kant drop psychology from the foundation of transcendental philosophy, and was he justified in doing so? His answers to all these questions attempt to defend the psychological interpretation. Regarding the first, he contends that psychology provides the foundation of the critical philosophy; regarding the second, he argues that we know the a priori through psychological observation; and regarding the third, he maintains that Kant was mistaken in not seeing the central role of psychology in transcendental philosophy.
Aware of the recent threats to the psychological interpretation, Meyer attempts to address them. He explicitly mentions the recent criticisms of Liebmann and Fischer (122–123). They had argued that transcendental philosophy cannot have a psychological foundation because we cannot know the a priori conditions of experience through empirical self-observation. These conditions are universal and necessary; but empirical self-observation provides only particular and contingent data, so no knowledge of these a priori conditions can be based upon it. As Fischer sharply declared: “What is a priori cannot be known a posteriori.”28 But Meyer finds a confusion in this argument: though a priori principles cannot be based upon empirical facts, they still can be known through them. We must not confuse the mode of justification of a priori principles with the mode of their discovery (143, 303). That it is possible for a priori principles to be known but not justified by empirical means was a central contention of Fries, whom Meyer explicitly defends on this score (143, 303).
Meyer thinks that there is substantial textual evidence to show that Kant used a psychological method in his transcendental philosophy. It is striking that he focuses on the very same text Fries once had: Kant’s Prize Essay, where Kant insisted that the methods of philosophy should be the same as those of the natural sciences (124–125).29 The method of the critical philosophy is the same procedure of self-reflection, analysis and abstraction that Kant had once outlined in the Prize Essay, Meyer insists. According to this method, to know the a priori conditions of experience, we must first reflect upon ourselves to see what principles we actually use in perceiving and understanding experience. We identify these principles by abstracting from the empirical elements in knowledge, and then by testing to see whether what remains has the hallmarks of the a priori, namely, universality and necessity.
While Meyer insists that Kant followed such a psychological method, he admits that Kant refused to acknowledge it, and that he even downplayed the role of psychology in transcendental philosophy. Famously, in the first Kritik Kant made a sharp distinction between the quid juris? and the quid facti?, stressing that the former question was his main concern, while the latter was a psychological matter about the origin of our representations. We do not justify our representations simply by pointing out their psychological origins, “their birthright from experience”, in the manner of “the celebrated Locke”, Kant declared (B 118–119). Though perfectly aware of this distinction, Meyer still insists that Kant was too quick in pushing aside the role of psychology in transcendental philosophy. Though psychology is not necessary to justify a priori principles, it is so to discover them. In sidelining psychology, Kant had assumed a much too narrow conception of its methods. He equated its methods with those of ordinary induction, with making observations and assembling facts; but he failed to consider that its methods are much wider, that it also includes analysis, abstraction and self-reflection (166, 304). We must carefully distinguish, Meyer argues, these methods from those of ordinary induction, though both are involved in empirical investigation in a broad sense (167, 168).
It was a source of some confusion on Meyer’s part, however, that though he made a distinction between discovery and justification, he did not explain how the methods for these tasks differ. While discovery involves self-reflection, analysis and abstraction, justification requires something quite different: assessment of evidence, inference, reasoning rigorously from first principles. Acknowledging the difference in these methods would have been indeed fatal to his argument for the importance of psychology to transcendental philosophy. For if the quid juris? is Kant’s main concern, and if answering this question does not require a psychological method, then psychology ceases to be so important to Kant after all. There are passages where Meyer seems to recognize the difference in methods (303, 305), but he does not stress it precisely because it undermines the importance he gives to psychology. There are other passages, however, where Meyer insists that the method of the critical philosophy is only psychological (168–169). In these he argues that once we broaden the psychological method to include not only induction but also abstraction and reflection, we can see that both the discovery and justification of a priori knowledge can be achieved by psychology (168). Regarding both discovery and justification, Meyer insisted: “It is always only a matter of one kind of knowledge of our soul, of one methodology regarding its factual being and the laws of its activity.” (169)
But in making this point Meyer was confusing an important distinction, Cohen and Windelband will later maintain. For the proof or deduction of a priori principles is a matter of logic, they contend, a matter of showing how they are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience; and such deduction is a matter of logical rather than psychological necessity; it is as a priori as the principles themselves. In other words, in a transcendental deduction, Cohen and Windelband hold, we want to show first and foremost the validity of the principles; we are not making a point about “the factual being and laws of activity” of the soul.30
Meyer’s tendency to reduce transcendental discourse down to the psychological is most apparent in his treatment of logic. In his Logik Kant had made a sharp distinction between logic and psychology: logic is normative, containing rules about how we ought to think; and psychology is factual, dealing with facts about how we happen to think.31 To base logic upon psychology, Kant argued, is like founding morals on life. But Meyer takes issue with Kant’s distinction on the grounds that logic has to be based upon observation and reflection, upon how we as a matter of fact do think (174, 181). Just as we know the rules of English by observing how native speakers talk and write, so we learn the rules of logic by observing the inferences that people happen to make. Kant’s distinction is fine, Meyer concedes, insofar as it informs us that logic is about how people must think and not only how they happen to think (174). But in making logic a matter of how we must think Meyer did not distinguish between psychological and logical necessity. He assumes that the necessity involved is essentially psychological, so that what makes the laws of logic valid is human nature, the basic fact that our faculties must operate in that way and no other. This brings his own account of logic close to Fries’ anthropology.32 Sure enough, Meyer praises Fries for having the best account of logic, because he saw that it should and could not be separated from psychology (180–181). Fries’ account of logic is superior to Kant’s, we learn, because Kant’s sharp and drastic separation of the logical from the psychological turned logic into a strictly formal but also sterile discipline. By keeping its connection with psychology, Fries prevented logic from sliding into sterility and bankruptcy.
Convinced of the fundamental role of psychology in Kant’s philosophy, Meyer had to address an even more basic question: Is Kant’s psychology obsolete? Has Kant provided a plausible psychological foundation for transcendental philosophy? Or is a completely new foundation necessary? This question too was very controversial. Since the 1830s, the growing influence of Herbart’s empirical psychology seemed to ring the death knell for Kant’s theory of mind. Herbart had criticized not only Kant’s reliance on the old faculty psychology but also his scholastic methodology of definition and a priori reasoning. Kant’s psychology was for Herbart a relic of that old Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism that Kant himself had done so much to overthrow. One of the central challenges Meyer faces in Kant’s Psychologie is addressing Herbart’s criticisms of Kant’s psychology.
Fortunately, Meyer did not have to stand alone in his battle against Herbart. In the early 1850s the apparently inevitable triumph of the Herbartian juggernaut ground to a halt due to the opposition of two formidable opponents: Lotze and Trendelenburg. It was in this decade that Lotze and Trendelenburg began to defend Kant’s theory against Herbart, especially its tripartite division of the mind into faculties of feeling, desire and representation.33 Though no great fans of the old faculty theory, Lotze and Trendelenburg argued that Kant’s tripartite division of the mind is more accurate in dealing with the facts than Herbart’s reduction of the mind down to the single faculty of representation. Meyer joined Lotze and Trendelenburg to defend Kant against the Herbartian assault. Accordingly, the first part of Kant’s Psychologie is devoted to explaining and justifying Kant’s psychology.
It was a singular feature of Meyer’s defence of Kant’s psychology that, unlike Lotze and Trendelenburg, it attempts to vindicate the concept of a faculty itself. Herbart had attacked that concept on a battery of grounds: that it was a refuge of ignorance, doing little more than renaming the phenomena to be explained; that it multiplied powers beyond necessity, inventing a faculty for any power of a body to act in certain ways; that it divided the soul into distinct compartments, undermining its identity; and so on.34 But Meyer thinks that none of these objections are compelling. They ignore the definite sense Kant gave to the concept of a faculty: it stands for not any power of a body to act in a certain way, but for its power to act in definite characteristic ways under the appropriate circumstances (86–87). The concept of a power applies specifically to a substance, and more specifically to the relation of a substance to its accidents insofar as it is the ground of their reality (84–85). While, admittedly, the concept of a power is not as definite as a natural law, it is still not empty because it serves to designate a definite primitive class of phenomena. We can, and indeed should, distinguish between faculties when each denotes an original class of phenomena, that is, a class that cannot be reduced down to or subsumed under another class. So if the soul produces different kinds of effects, some of which are qualitatively distinct from others, then it should have different faculties (119). While Herbart worried about the identity of the soul if it is divided into separate faculties, Meyer points out that it is perfectly possible for one and the same soul to have distinctive ways of acting and functioning (87). Kant rightly saw that a division of the soul into distinct functions is perfectly compatible with its numerical identity (119).
Meyer takes his defence of Kant’s psychology a step further by going on the offensive against Herbart. Not only is Kant’s idea of a faculty defensible, we are told, but his tripartite theory of the mind is preferable to Herbart’s own monolithic theory. It was not Kant but Herbart himself who was guilty of lapsing into the old rationalism. For Herbart had gone back to the old Wolffian theory of the mind as a vis representativae, a power of representation, reducing desire and feeling down to different functions of representation. But Kant was entirely correct, Meyer contends, to have criticized the Wolffian theory and to have insisted upon three fundamental faculties of the mind, namely, feeling, desire and representation. These are original or primitive faculties because there is no way one is reducible to the other. Although feeling and desire are aroused by representation and always accompanied with it, they have new qualities all their own (91, 94). Feeling is not the same as just having certain sensations because, as Fries and Lotze stressed, it also involves the act of valuing these sensations; and it is not the same as desire because, as Kant argued, we can have a distinterested pleasure in things. Desire is different from the striving for representation, as Herbart explains it, because desire also includes, as Trendelenburg observes, the desire to get or possess something (95). Desire is not just striving itself but the felt need behind it (96). Conversely, representation is distinct from desire and feeling because we are often indifferent to many things that we perceive or know (105–107).
While Herbart had objected to Kant’s method in psychology as a relapse into Wolffian scholasticism, because it imposes a priori methods and concepts upon empirical data, Meyer responded that Kant did follow an empirical method of self-reflection by noting the different kinds of mental phenomena and showing how they are distinct from one another. Herbart had objected to such methods of introspection on the grounds that the data we see often depends on the concepts and presuppositions that we read into them. Though Meyer agrees that introspection could often be unreliable in this manner, he pointed out that throwing out introspection entirely was like throwing out the telescope in astronomy on the grounds that it could sometimes give unreliable results (104). The distinction between objective observation and subjective factors was vital to all the sciences, and there was no reason that psychology too, provided it took sufficient care, could not make such distinctions no less than astronomy (292–293).
After rebutting Herbart’s objections, Meyer concludes with an emphatic vindication of Kant’s psychology. He insists that Kant’s transcendental philosophy rests on a psychological foundation, and that this foundation is essentially sound and secure. Kant followed the right method and he reached the right results (121). He correctly determined the different classes of mental phenomena, and he rightly stressed their unity in the mind. Kant’s only shortcoming is failing to acknowledge his psychological methods. The greater use of psychology, Meyer contends, would have saved Kant from the formalism of his logic and ethics.
Such was the ultimate message of Meyer’s book, which he had put forward with great rigour and vigour. Yet, by the end of the 1870s, it would seem obsolete, a faint echo from years past. Though Meyer could scarcely have foreseen it, Kant’s Psychologie would prove to be the last statement of the psychological-physiological interpretation of Kant.
Meyer’s major philosophical work was his Zeitfragen, Populären Aufsätze, which appeared in 1870.35 The work had some success in its day, since it received favourable reviews and went into a second edition. Today, however, it is forgotten, neglected even by neo-Kantian scholars. This is a pity because the work is one of the best in the neo-Kantian pantheon. It is extremely wide-ranging, treating the nature of mind, matter, life, freedom, morality and religion; and its discussions are remarkably thorough, well-informed and incisive. The chief problem with the work is that it is too ambitious: it tries to cover so many issues that it leaves crucial questions dangling. Still, Meyer never pretended to provide definitive solutions to anything; he only wanted to keep the discussion going and to explore aspects of an issue. He engaged in the same kind of tentative, exploratory thinking as Liebmann and Windelband, a species of philosophizing that is a hallmark of much neo-Kantian philosophy.
As the title indicates, Zeitfragen was meant to be about topical issues. Meyer discusses the current state of philosophy, the latest literature on the mind–body problem, the merits of Darwinism and the condition of religion in Germany. And as the subtitle shows, the book was intended to be popular, though Meyer promised he would not let popularity compromise intellectual content. It is indeed one of the merits of his book that it is both accessible and rigorous. These two features of the book—its topicality and popularity—are tokens of Meyer’s allegiance to the old cause of Aufklärung.
We cannot begin to do justice here to the richness of Zeitfragen. We will focus in this, and in the following section, solely on three major issues addressed in the book: the crisis of philosophy, free-will and the stature of religion in the modern world. These issues are chosen because they are especially revealing regarding Meyer’s place in the neo-Kantian movement.
Meyer, like all neo-Kantians, was worried about the danger of obsolescence facing philosophy, and he formulated his own solution to it, which appears in the first and last chapters of Zeitfragen.36 Like Fischer and Zeller, he thinks that the crisis of philosophy arose from the demise of the great idealist systems. These systems collapsed because they were simply too ambitious; and when they failed to achieve their lofty goals, philosophy itself became rudderless and lost. One of the grand aspirations of the idealist systems was to provide a foundation for all the particular sciences. But these sciences had grown independent of philosophy, achieving great success by using their own standards and methods. Now that they had become autonomous, they saw no need for philosophy at all. Another quixotic goal of the idealist systems was to know the absolute, to gain insight into the origin and end of all things, and to do so by means of pure reason. But this ambition too proved unattainable, chiefly because these philosophers failed to heed Kant’s old lesson: that the place of philosophy lay in the bathos of experience (7).
Meyer does not think that philosophy will ever again recover its role as a founder and grounder of the particular sciences, nor that it will ever be able to achieve success in its attempt to know the absolute. This is, of course, for not historical but systematic reasons. Like a good Kantian, Meyer thinks that the idealist systems went beyond the limits of reason. But that leaves the question: whither philosophy? If it cannot be the foundation of the sciences, if it cannot give knowledge of the absolute, what good is it?
A large part of Meyer’s answer to this question came, predictably enough, from his psychologistic programme. Philosophy can avoid obsolescence, Meyer thinks, only if it becomes psychology. At first blush this sounds like a paradox or joke: philosophy can save itself only if it becomes something else. Yet we must remember that psychology in the 1870s had no fixed identity, and that it did not necessarily mean the experimental science we now associate with the discipline. Meyer explains that philosophy, conceived as psychology, will have its own unique place in the sciences because it will consider the mind as such and in general, unlike all the particular sciences, which treat the mind in its relation to specific objects. Philosophy will be the study of the mind itself, apart from all its special uses, and apart from its relations to particular things (10).
It is a notable feature of Meyer’s solution to the crisis that, unlike Fischer and Zeller, he does not envisage a future for philosophy in epistemology. Since, like Beneke, he sees knowledge as a function of the mind, he subsumes epistemology under psychology. Meyer rides roughshod over Kant’s distinctions between quid facti? and quid juris?, between first-order knowledge of the world and second-order knowledge of knowledge. For him, the chief concern of philosophy involves only a special kind of first-order knowledge: knowledge of the mind itself.
The reduction of epistemology to psychology, and the blurring of the distinction between first- and second-order questions, left Meyer vulnerable to the charge that he really had abandoned philosophy after all. This would later become a standard objection against his psychologism, which the Marburgians and Southwesterners saw as a betrayal of philosophy itself.
Whatever the difficulties with psychologism, it was only one half of Meyer’s solution to the crisis of obsolescence. Now relenting from his old reservations about metaphysics, Meyer, like Fischer, Zeller and Liebmann, began to see it as an essential part of philosophy. Despite Kant’s critique of that discipline, he believed that philosophy should provide a general “worldview” (Weltanschauung) (11, 423). This worldview would not be an attempt to know the absolute or the unconditioned, as in the idealist systems of the past, but it would strive to determine the general principles and interconnections between all things, especially the mind and the body. The task of the critical philosopher was not to provide definitive solutions to the problems of metaphysics—that lay beyond the boundaries of knowledge—but to adjudicate the disputes between the metaphysical systems, to correct their dogmatism and to encourage discussion. Meyer saw his own Zeitfragen as the sketch for a worldview, though he refused to claim that it had any ultimate validity or that it was the definitive solution to the problems.
Another major concern of Meyer’s Zeitfragen is to defend freedom of the will.37 He had already cast himself in this role in some of his earlier articles,38 though now he returns to the task more systematically. His aim then was to demonstrate only the possibility of freedom of will; a proof of its reality, he insisted, went beyond the limits of knowledge. Meyer returns to this modest position here, though now defending it against a wider range of detractors.
Freedom of the will means for Meyer two things: first, the power of decision, the ability to choose between different course of actions; and, second, the power to do what we find right, the ability to act upon our decisions. He insists that it does not consist in only self-determination, that is, acting according to the necessity of our own nature, because it also involves the power to do otherwise, to act differently from how we have chosen.39 Understood in this sense freedom should also not be identified with dutiful action, because we are still free should we choose to act contrary to duty. Freedom in the strong sense of having the power to do otherwise, Meyer maintains, is necessary to moral responsibility.40
The main evidence for such freedom, Meyer contends, consists in our normal moral consciousness, in our feeling of responsibility or conscience, which tells us that we have the power to do the good or right, and that we could have done otherwise if we fail to do it. He realizes that the determinist, whether materialist or idealist, questions such testimony on the grounds that it rests on ignorance of the deeper causes of our own action. Still, Meyer holds his ground, stressing that the determinist also cannot disprove such testimony. If he cannot convince the determinist by having him look into his own inner consciousness, then the defender of freedom will do nothing more than “quietly take in his sail and anchor in the harbor of immediate self-consciousness”.41 In the end, Meyer realizes that belief in freedom is a matter of faith, though it is a belief we, as moral agents, find it impossible to renounce.
Meyer defends freedom of will against several detractors, but there is one that especially concerns him in Zeitfragen: Arthur Schopenhauer. Not least because of Schopenhauer’s growing popularity in the 1860s, Meyer felt it necessary to take pains in responding to him.42 His defence of freedom of will against Schopenhauer shows remarkable parallels with Liebmann’s own efforts only a few years earlier.43 Like Liebmann, Meyer wants to defend the testimony of our normal moral consciousness against Schopenhauer, who declares it illusory. On Meyer’s reading, Schopenhauer denies freedom of will on the grounds that: a) all actions have motives; and: b) all motives are determined by character in its interaction with particular circumstances (224, 234–237). Meyer agrees with Schopenhauer that all actions must have motives or reasons, that there cannot be a completely motiveless or irrational will that chooses a course of action for no reason at all; but he disagrees with Schopenhauer that we have no choice about our motives, that which motive we adopt is completely determined by character. The crucial question with regard to freedom, he maintains, depends on whether or not we have a free choice about our motives (238). And Meyer is eager to defend the possibility of just such a choice. Motives do not determine choice, but choice determines motives, in that which motive we act upon depends on our powers of deliberation, which give greater weight to some motives over others.44 But free will is also not simply the last motive after deliberation, because we have the power to choose and act contrary to the reasons we find best. It is one of the dangling threads of Meyer’s discussion of freedom that he does not explain, though he assumes, the possibility of weakness of will.
What makes freedom of choice possible, Meyer argues, is precisely that, pace Schopenhauer, our character is not completely fixed and inflexible. It was a crucial premise of Schopenhauer’s determinism that our individual and empirical character is completely determined and settled, that the choices we make are an expression of our character, which we do not have the power to alter. Meyer contests this very premise, however, insisting that character is not always fixed and that it is as much an effect as cause of our choices. He admits that there are a few rare individuals who have rigid and strong characters which makes them always choose one course of action without the slightest doubt or hesitation; but, he insists, most people are not like this; in most cases they find themselves having to struggle to make a decision, having to weigh one motive over another (245–247). The reason that they go through an inner struggle is precisely because their character is not fixed; and they have the power through their will to form their character in one direction or the other (246–247). We say that people have a “second nature”, and it is this nature that is the product of the steady and firm resolve of our will to do one thing over another.
Of course, Schopenhauer questioned the so-called “facts” attested by our normal moral consciousness, especially the belief that we could have done otherwise on a particular occasion. To cast doubt upon it, he brought forth a wealth of examples to show that people often recognize that they could not do otherwise than they did. His favourite cases, drawn from newspapers and novels, were of criminals who first professed their guilt, but who then said, in the very act of confession and contrition, that they would still do the same again if given half the chance. Meyer questions, however, whether these examples show what Schopenhauer reads into them: that the person could not do otherwise and acted of necessity. When the contrite criminal admits his guilt it is precisely because he feels that he could have done otherwise; he asks for punishment because he feels he deserves it; and he blames not his maker for his character but his own self (241).
Schopenhauer’s determinism is a qualified one, though, because it holds only for our empirical and individual character. That character itself, Schopenhauer maintained, is determined by a primal act of will, an act that is free because it can choose one character rather than another.45 Meyer notes this transcendent indeterminism in Schopenhauer’s theory, but, like Liebmann, he declares it irrelevant for the problem of moral responsibility (243). What we hold responsible, he insists, is the will of our empirical and individual character; the primal act that creates this character is not relevant, because, on Schopenhauer’s own premises, it is unknowable, standing above and beyond the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer had complained that the normal conception of free will is absurd because it presupposes the existence of something indeterminate, something that could be either A or not A, depending on its arbitrary acts of choice. But Meyer replies that this objection applies more readily to Schopenhauer’s primal act of will, which is free to decide between different characters. It does not apply to our empirical and individual will, however, because, even though it is changeable, it is determinate in whatever it decides to be (249).
Though Meyer defends Kant’s views about the testimony of our normal moral consciousness, he is otherwise highly critical of Kant’s theory of freedom. Rather than upholding the possibility of moral responsibility, he argues, Kant’s theory undermines it (242). Taking into account Kant’s exposition in the second Kritik, Meyer finds the difficulty with Kant’s theory in its identification of freedom with the rational will. Since the rational will acts according to the moral law, immoral actions cease to be free. On the Kantian theory, whether we act according to the moral law depends not on an act of choice but on the strength or weakness of our sensible or phenomenal nature, which is locked in a struggle with our moral will. If that nature is strong, then it defeats our moral will; and if it is weak, it complies with it. But in either case it is not a matter of our will whether we are free and act according to the moral law. Kant writes as if our sensible and rational natures are completely determined, as if it were impossible for us to determine what that nature should be. He needs to realize that freedom demands that we also create our nature or character.
It is easy to see the point behind Meyer’s criticisms of Kant and Schopenhauer. But in his refusal to locate the will in the noumenal realm, and in his insistence on making the empirical and individual will the source of moral action, Meyer raised anew the very danger of determinism that he was so eager to avoid. For if the acts of will take place in the phenomenal and natural world, how do they avoid the determinism of that world? How can we uphold freedom of choice in a phenomenal or natural world where all events conform to the principle of sufficient reason? It seems that we are back where we started: we have to accept a complete determinism with Schopenhauer or place freedom in the noumenal world with Kant. It is another of the dangling threads of Zeitfragen that Meyer does not consider this fundamental issue.
Meyer’s concern with defending human freedom takes a remarkable metaphysical turn when he considers theological objections against freedom of will. Now Meyer enters into the murkiest depths of metaphysics and theology when he treats the classical questions whether human freedom is compatible with divine omniscience and omnipotence. For a philosopher who has already announced his allegiance to the Kantian limitations on knowledge this seems a surprising turn of thought. But Meyer is forced to go down this path given his original goal of defending human freedom. For he cannot beg one crucial question: If there were a God, could human beings be free? Many theologians have held that the divine omniscience and omnipotence make human freedom impossible. Not the least of these theologians, Meyer is eager to remind his Protestant readers, was Martin Luther himself.
Before wading into these treacherous waters, Meyer announces a rule of investigation to hold at bay charges of metaphysical self-indulgence (266). Rather than starting with speculations about the divine nature, and then seeing whether and how belief in human freedom conforms to them, he will begin with human experience and then determine which theological views best explain it. This way of proceeding better suits the order of our knowledge, he thinks, because what we know from human experience is more certain than speculations about the divine nature; we should not forfeit the certainty of human experience for the uncertainty of metaphysical speculation. Since it is an integral part of our human experience that we are self-conscious as free agents, that we have the power to choose between different courses of action, we should take this as the desideratum for any adequate theology. This means that should a theology conflict with belief in human freedom, then so much the worse for it.
Taking this rule as his starting point, Meyer immediately rejects pantheistic views of human freedom (267). He especially targets the position of David Friedrich Strauβ, who attempts to explain human freedom from a pantheistic perspective.46 According to Strauβ, pantheism is compatible with human freedom because making God omnipresent and part of myself means that I share in the divine freedom; I am not compelled into action by anything outside myself because God’s free action is part of myself. But Meyer objects that this does not allow the experience of freedom of choice, given that the individual still has to act according to the necessity of the divine nature. Having thus rejected pantheism, Meyer concludes that only theism, which distinguishes between God and the world, is compatible with the human self-awareness of freedom (268). But that leaves the question: Which form of theism? How, exactly, must we conceive of the divine attributes, and God’s relation to the world, to uphold belief in human freedom?
One major stumbling block in reconciling theism with human freedom is the attribute of divine omnipotence: if everything is created and maintained by God, then how are human beings free to do anything by themselves? Our freedom would seem to be a limit on the divine omnipotence. Meyer attempts to resolve this conundrum by drawing a limit to God’s actions in the world: while God’s actions are necessary to create and maintain the essence or being of things, they are not so for the actions of these things (268). We must distinguish between the essence of things and their actions, where only their essence requires the creative and preservative powers of the divine. As a free agent himself, God has created other human free agents in his image, allowing everything necessary for the exercise of their freedom (258). It is not a limit but a reflection of divine power, when human beings use the freedom God has chosen to give them (258, 276).
The other chief obstacle to human freedom is the attribute of divine foreknowledge: if God knows everything, then he knows all human actions, past, present and future; but if he knows our future actions, they should be preordained, so that we are not free after all. Meyer attempts to move around this obstacle by suggesting several possibilities about divine foreknowledge: that is limited to necessary truths, excluding the contingency required of human freedom; that it is still perfect even if it does not include possible actions; that it is eternal, excluding the temporal realm of human action (276). Meyer sees the problems with these possibilities, all of which limit divine omniscience in one way or another. Which is the least problematic? Meyer does not say, leaving his reader hanging at cliff’s edge.
Whatever the merits of these reflections, they raise the question whether Meyer, by engaging in them, has gone beyond his own self-imposed critical limits. In his defence it has to be said that Meyer does not claim to provide knowledge of God, only what God must be if human freedom is to be possible. The whole enquiry therefore has a strictly hypothetical value. In adopting his rule to base his investigation upon the experience of human freedom, Meyer follows something like Kant’s doctrine of practical faith, which would base religious belief upon morality, and indeed ultimately the experience of human freedom. It is precisely here, however, that Meyer’s speculations raise questions, for, as we have seen, he is harshly critical of that Kantian doctrine. He had seen Kant’s demonstrations of the existence of God and immortality as illegitimate extensions of the powers of reason, and he had insisted that the realm of faith should be that of individual belief alone. But Meyer’s own reflections on the nature of God, however hypothetical, were not intended to be fantasies of his individual belief; they were demonstrations of what must be under certain assumptions (viz. the existence of God and immortality), and they took as their starting point the facts of moral consciousness.
One of Meyer’s major aims as a philosopher was to revitalize the philosophy of religion, which had drastically declined since the 1840s, since the heady and happy years of the Tübingen and Hegelian schools. This aim appears in full force in his chapter on the philosophy of religion in Zeitfragen, which is one of the longest in the book.47 That there is a desperate need to revive the discipline is evident, Meyer thinks, from the stifling indifference towards religion in contemporary German life. There is little philosophical discussion of religion among the public, and even less among philosophers. Religion is regarded as a concern for clerics or a private matter of the individual conscience. Regarding the source of this indifference, Meyer is uncertain. Perhaps it is due to the spread of materialism? Perhaps it comes from the general discredit of philosophy? Perhaps too it is the result of the overwhelming practical interests of the age? Whatever the cause, Meyer thinks that the indifference towards religion should not, and indeed really cannot, last. Without going into details, he refers to the present state of German social and political life, insisting that it is now imperative to hold public discussions about religion. Writing in the late 1860s, Meyer was doubtless referring to the new cultural situation of the second Reich, which had integrated Catholics and Protestants into a single state. How could Germany be a single nation yet both Catholic and Protestant? What loyalty would Catholics have to the Prussian state, which was officially Protestant? The forces behind the Kulturkampf, which would erupt in 1872, were already brewing. To sort out the many religious and theological issues arising from unification, Meyer thinks that it is necessary to revive the philosophy of religion. Only a philosophy of religion can discuss the most general issues that are the source of all the controversy and partisanship, issues like the relationship between reason and faith, God and the world (355–356).
In making his case for the philosophy of religion, Meyer is eager to combat two old but persistent prejudices about religious belief. One is the old view that there should be a divide, a clear wall of separation, between the religious ideas of the intellectuals and the faith of the people, because what the intellectuals think could be dangerous for the faith of the masses, who should be kept in social and political harness. This view, which appears in Reimarus, Lessing and Kant, is no longer appropriate for our more educated and enlightened age, Meyer argues, because now everyone has an opinion and everyone wants to think for himself. As he roundly puts it: “We have given up dividing participation in the investigation of truth according to classes and professions” (361). The other prejudice is the claim that religion is a private matter, a purely personal issue of no concern to the public at large. Meyer finds this problematic, because religion is not simply a matter of feeling but also of thinking; it involves claims to truth, and the only means of determining their validity is through open discussion with others (363). To Meyer, something like Kierkegaardian inwardness and subjectivity would have seemed like an evasion.
Given that religion is now a concern for the general public, and given that it is not simply a private matter, there is all the more reason to have public discourse about it. Meyer thinks that it is chiefly the role of philosophers to create this discourse and to clarify the basic issues about it. Adapting some famous lines from Plato, he writes that there will be improvement in the religious affairs of the nation only if religious teachers become philosophers or philosophers become religious teachers (365). Seldom has so much confidence been placed in the role of philosophers in the discussion of religious belief.
True to the critical standpoint he developed in the 1850s, Meyer continues to hold that philosophy has no objective criterion to determine the truth or falsity of religious faith (398). Still, philosophy has a valuable role to perform in clarifying the controversies between the religious parties, in assessing the truth or falsity of their arguments on specific issues, and in showing the exact limits of knowledge (356). Apart from this purely critical role, Meyer assigns another task to the philosophy of religion: it must show in a systematic manner how religion arises from human nature (369, 371). Against the materialists, who think that religion is an eradicable superstition, a religious anthropology will demonstrate how religion is a constant element of all human culture, and that it is so because it arises from basic human needs. Since we cannot eradicate these needs, as the materialist wants, we have to learn to understand and accept them. The common element behind all religion, Meyer maintains, is the feeling of dependence on higher powers in the universe and the need to honour them (376).
Meyer’s religious anthropology was a frankly apologetic one. Its task was, as he puts it, “to say the right word on behalf of faith” (276). It was by showing how religion is based on essential human needs that we could find some justification for it. Although reason cannot provide an objective demonstration of religious beliefs, viz., the existence of God, providence and immortality, we can still determine from our experience which religion best suits our needs as human beings (398). This would provide a kind of Friesian “transcendental deduction” of religion: it is not by dogmatic proof or syllogistic reasoning but by tracing beliefs back to their origins in human nature that we provide a justification for them.48 Since we cannot get beyond our own nature, the deeper questions about the objective truth of religion will be unanswerable for us; but it is that very human nature that also provides the ultimate test of the worth of any religion.
Not content merely to state a general programme, Meyer proceeds to sketch the desiderata or foundation for a religious anthropology. Like Zeller, he stresses how religion arises from all sides of human nature, from our three fundamental drives: thinking, willing and feeling. Religion involves thinking since it strives to comprehend the universe as a whole, to grasp everything finite as one part of the infinite; it concerns willing since it lays down moral precepts and prescribes actions; and it consists in feeling, the sense for, or intuition of, the infinite present in the finite. Meyer is critical of his great predecessors—Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher and Fries—because they all have an overly one-sided conception of religion which reduces it down to one of these factors alone. Kant went too far in reducing religion down to moral duty, because that made its concern with the universe as a whole superfluous. Schleiermacher and Fries were right to stress the importance of feeling and aesthetic experience; but they failed to see how feeling is dependent upon thinking, how the feeling for the infinite in the finite arises from the effort of thinking to get beyond the sensible world. Hegel was right to correct Schleiermacher for his one-sided emphasis on feeling, but he went too far in the opposite direction, overstating the role of thinking. A proper religious anthropology will justify religion by showing how it addresses all these sides of our human nature.
It is especially in his chapter on religion in Zeitfragen that one witnesses Meyer’s project for the restoration of the Enlightenment. Time and again he pleads for the rehabilitation of the ideal of natural religion, which had been a mainstay of Enlightenment deism. Although he had no intention of reviving the old proofs for the existence of God and immorality, the idea behind his religious anthropology is still to show how religion is lodged in human nature. Even if we could not find religion in nature outside us, as the old deists wanted, Meyer was confident that we could find it within us. Religion would still have a universal sanction, standing above the vagaries of culture and custom. Sure enough, Meyer stresses that one of the values of his religious anthropology is that it will get beyond the sectarian strife of the age, locating the basic core beliefs held by Protestant, Catholic and Jew alike. A broad invisible church would also have the advantage of restoring tolerance, which is the first rule for all intellectual discussion and controversy. Such was the old latitudinarian credo of the early Enlightenment, which Meyer now endorses and recommends for his own age.
In rejecting pantheism, in stressing the natural dimension of religion, and in preaching the need for tolerance, Meyer sounds like nothing more than an 18th-century deist. It was no accident that his great model in religious affairs was Voltaire.49 He admired Voltaire for his deism, for his scepticism about religious controversy and revelation, for his insistence on the role of reason in religion, and above all for his advocacy of toleration in religious affairs. It is this Voltairean spirit that stands behind his attempt to rehabilitate the Enlightenment, which is the ultimate inspiration behind Zeitfragen.
It was one of the weaknesses of neo-Kantianism in the 1860s that it had little to say about history. The neo-Kantians had prided themselves on maintaining a close relationship with the empirical sciences, and they were very quick to censure the speculative idealists for ignoring them or treating them in a stepmotherly fashion. They had indeed made it the special business of philosophy to examine the logic of the empirical sciences, to investigate their methods, standards and presuppositions. But, while they were active in discussing physics and physiology, they had virtually ignored history. This was a glaring omission. For history had been rapidly advancing in the early 19th century, and it had made bold claims to be a science in its own right. The new critical history of Ranke and Niebuhr, and the historical school of law of Savigny and Eichhorn, which had fully emerged by the 1830s, had claimed that history could be a science no less than physics and chemistry. While history could not employ the same methods of observation and experiment as physics and physiology, it still had methods and standards of its own, rigorous procedures for discovering sources, weighing testimony, and for drawing conclusions in proportion to the evidence. Surely, here was fertile ground for philosophical investigation. All kinds of questions arose. What, exactly, are the methods and standards of history? How do they differ from those of the natural sciences? What, indeed, do we mean by science, and how, if at all, does history conform to it? It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the neo-Kantians would turn to these questions. They did so only later in the century, beginning with Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften and Windelband’s Straßburg Rectoral Address.50 By the turn of the century the logic of history will become the chief interest of the Southwestern school.
Given the neo-Kantians turned so late to history, it is interesting to note that Meyer wrote a very substantial article on the philosophy of history already in 1871, his ‘Neue Versuche einer Philosophie der Geschichte’, which appeared in the Historische Zeitschrift in 1871.51 This was the first major writing by a neo-Kantian on the logic of history. It was essentially a review article, a critique of the latest writings on the philosophy of history. Meyer passes in review recent efforts in the field by Lotze, Comte, Buckle, Mill and a host of others.52 But the article is not just a pastiche of critical comments. Meyer formulates his own position on several important issues concerning the philosophy of history. He is concerned especially with two questions: Is a philosophy of history possible? And what is the precise relationship between the philosophy of history and history proper?
Regarding the first question, Meyer responds affirmatively. He maintains that a philosophy of history should be indeed possible, though he admits that none of the recent forays into the field have made concrete steps towards its realization. His chief criticism of the latest works is that they have stated their general programmes for a philosophy of history but then they have done nothing towards developing or executing them. Meyer gives a special meaning to the philosophy of history: it is a history that follows the naturalistic programmes of Mill, Buckle, Comte and Lotze. According to their programme, a philosophy of history determines the general scientific laws of history, where these are laws of human conduct, that is, laws determining cause–effect relationships between human beings and their natural environment; it does not attempt to determine, however, the purpose, end or design of history. While Meyer does not rule out the possibility of such a teleological history, he thinks that it should follow from a more empirical history, one that determines the laws of human conduct itself. It was a mistake of speculative idealism, he argues, that it proceeded in an a priori fashion, laying down what these general purposes should be and then attempting to find evidence for them in experience (345, 362). It is only after we determine the general laws of human conduct, Meyer maintains, that we can determine whether they conform to broader ends or purposes (374–375).
Meyer’s confidence in the possibility of a philosophy of history is based chiefly on his belief in the possibility of psychology itself. He maintains that history, as a science of human action, should be based on psychology, which offers the best explanation of human actions. So if psychology can be a science, so should be the history founded on it. For Meyer, the possibility of psychology as a science is unproblematic, because it can be based upon observation and experiment like all other empirical sciences. Kant’s doubts about psychology as a science were misplaced, because they rested upon his deductive paradigm of science, which is inappropriate for and inapplicable to all empirical sciences.53 Assuming that we can determine the general laws of human action, we can then apply them to particular cases, finding more specific laws for how people act in more specific circumstances. These more specific laws will be the laws of history itself (382). What Meyer means by history here is close to anthropology, or what Mill calls “ethology” and Lazarus “folk psychology”, projects he explicitly endorses (332, 335, 338).
Meyer’s model for the philosophy of history is taken less from Mill and Lazarus than a much more predictable source: Kant. He maintains that Kant’s essay ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ should be the “the starting point” for all new efforts in the philosophy of history (342). Kant clearly affirmed the general idea of a scientific history when he claimed that, despite the chaos of individual choices, there is still a regular law-like development in history. He provided “the guiding thread” for “any future philosophy of history that comes forth as a science” in his maxims that all natural powers of an individual will develop, and that they will develop in the species as a whole. In seeing history as a story about the development of human powers, Kant also rightly grasped that history has its basis in psychology.
Yet, for all his insistence on the importance of psychology, Meyer knew that history is more complicated than his psychological programme made it appear. The more interesting side of his article is when he takes to task the scientific programme of Mill, Buckle and Lazarus, which he otherwise endorses. Thus Meyer argues against Mill that psychological laws alone do not make up all of history (335). Nations and states are historical structures of their own whose changes cannot be explained by psychology alone (335–336). Meyer implies that these nations and states have their own logic and development which transcends psychology, and that there can be a distinctive science about them provided that it sticks close to determining causal interactions in experience (336). More significantly, he recognizes that the individual, which is the starting point of psychology, cannot be understood on its own but has to be placed in its wider social and historical context (337). Psychological analysis alone cannot answer fundamental questions, namely, whether morality, aesthetics and logic are innate or acquired; to answer them, we have to look into history as a whole. But, having recognized the insufficiency of his psychological starting point, Meyer fails to ask the further question how history in the broader non-psychological sense is possible.
Regarding the question about the relationship between the philosophy of history and history proper, Meyer notes the “struggle of life and death” between them. Each alone claims to be science. History questions the credentials of philosophy of history, which bases its generalizations on too few facts and ignores empirical evidence; and the philosophy of history scorns history, which deals only with particularities and never ascends to the level of science, which requires universality and necessity (321). Since it is the task of a critical philosopher to settle disputes between disciplines, Meyer steps in to reconcile the parties. Refusing to draw sharp boundaries between them, Meyer attempts to wed them by stressing their interdependence (340–341). Like a good Kantian, he thinks that theory is empty without the particular facts of history (339), and that historical narrative is blind without the guidance of causal analysis and diagnosis (336).
While Meyer defends the possibility of a general philosophy of history, he does not draw the conclusion that it alone enjoys scientific status. He is eager to defend the status of history as a science on its own, and counters the views of Mill, Lazarus and Buckle that history can be a science only insofar as it becomes a general philosophy of history. These thinkers assume that the status of history as a science rests on it having the same kind of general laws as the natural sciences; a discipline is a science, they hold, only to the extent that it can have general laws, because universality and necessity is the condition of all knowledge in the proper sense. Without general laws, history consists in little more than narrative, a description of facts, which does not amount to science. Yet Meyer does not think that the philosophy of history has a monopoly on the title of science. History too is still a science, he argues, even if it investigates particular social and political structures in a particular time and place (335–336). Though such an investigation has to be consistent with general laws about human nature, it also does not follow from them. The careful investigation of particular facts, and the analysis and explanation of them, is still scientific, Meyer insists, even if it does not consider their ultimate causes or the basic laws of human actions. Indeed, the closer one sticks to particular facts and experience the more certain the results (336). It is misconceived to dismiss the scientific status of historical narrative, which is never completely separable from causal analysis and diagnosis (336–337). Through a glass darkly, Meyer was anticipating a view of historical discourse that will later be thematized by the Southwestern school: that history is “ideographic” rather than “nomothetic”, a science of the particular rather than the universal.
Though Meyer’s article is crude and raises more questions than it answers, it still had the merit of inaugurating the neo-Kantian investigation of history. Like so much of Meyer’s writing, though, it too was forgotten. When the Southwesterners—Windelband, Rickert and Lask—wrote about history in the 1890s, never would they mention their fellow neo-Kantian who had preceded them. And so, undeservedly, Meyer faded away into the mists of the past.
1 We will discuss Meyer’s contributions to these controversies in Chapter 10, Sections 2 and 4, and Chapter 11, Section 3.
2 Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 157–163.
3 The main source on Meyer’s life is the article by Theodor Lipps in the Biographischer Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog II (1898), 397–400. See also Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 55 (1910), 560–563.
4 Meyer, Aristotles Thierkunde, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Zoologie, Physiologie und alten Philosophie (Berlin: Reimer, 1855).
5 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Hermann Bonitz and Bernhard Langkauel, Index Aristotelicus (Berlin: Reimer, 1870).
6 See Trendelenburg to Hermann Lotze, December 14, 1856, in Hermann Lotze, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Reinhardt Pester (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), p. 293. Trendelenburg seemed to disapprove of Meyer’s interest in French philosophy, which he saw as a diversion.
7 This bore fruit with his 1856 Hamburg lectures on Voltaire and Rousseau, published under the title Voltaire und Rousseau in ihrer socialen Bedeutung (Berlin: Reimer, 1856).
8 See Meyer’s July 3, 1861, letter to Hermann Lotze, in Lotze, Briefe und Dokumente, pp. 379–381.
9 Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1994), p. 71, n.47.
10 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Kant’s Ansicht über die Psychologie als Wissenschaft. Einladungsschrift zum Amtsantritt der ordentlichen Professur der Philosophie an der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität am 9 Januar 1869 (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1869).
11 Among these writings: Die Fortbildungsschule in unserer Zeit (Berlin: Luderitz, 1873); Zum Bildungskampf unserer Zeit (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1875); Deutsche Universitätsentwicklung: Vorzeit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (Berlin: Habel, 1874). Meyer also produced an anthology of the pedagogical writings of Frederick II: Friedrichs der Grossen pädagogischen Schriften und Ausserungen (Langasalza: Beyer & Söhne, 1875).
12 The origin of Meyer’s Friesianism is obscure. He perhaps learned about Fries from Friedrich von Calker (1790–1870), a disciple of Fries who was a professor in Bonn when Meyer was a student there.
13 Meyer, ADB 55 (1910), 562.
14 Rudolph Wagner, Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz. Einen anthropologischer Vortrag gehalten in der ersten öffentlichen Sitzung der 31. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze zu Göttingen am 18. Sept. 1854 (Göttingen: Wigand, 1854).
15 Meyer, Voltaire und Rousseau, p. 29.
16 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Zum Streit über Leib und Seele. Worte der Kritik. Sechs Vorlesungen am Hamburger akademischen Gymnasium gehalten. (Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1856). All references in parentheses are to this edition.
17 Jürgen Bona Meyer, ‘Zum neuesten Stand des Streits über Leib und Seele’: ‘I. Kann Materie denken?’, Deutsches Museum, Nr. 49 (4. Dez. 1856), 826–834; ‘II. Die Lehre von der Willensfreiheit im Materialismus und Idealismus’, Deutsches Museum, Nr. 51 (18. Dez. 1856), 906–916; ‘III. Willensfreiheit und Sittengesetz’, Deutsches Museum, Nr. 10 (5 März 1857), 345–358; and ‘IV: Ueber den Sinn und Werth des Kriticismus’, Deutsches Museum, Nr. 11 (11 März 1857), 395–402.
18 Jürgen Bona Meyer, ‘Ueber den Kriticismus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Kant’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 37 (1860), 226–263; and 39 (1861), 46–66.
19 Meyer, Zum Streit, ‘Zweite Vorlesung’, pp. 25–48.
20 Meyer, ‘Ueber den Kriticismus’, pp. 47–49. Meyer cites extensive passages from Kant’s Träume, AA II, 327, 368.
21 See Kant, Prolegomena, AA IV, 373, 375.
22 See Meyer, ‘Ueber den Sinn und Werth des Kriticismus’, p. 399.
23 Meyer, ‘Ueber den Kriticismus’, pp. 250–251.
24 See Meyer, ‘Ueber den Kriticismus’, pp. 262, 54; Meyer, Zum Streit, pp. v, 123.
25 Meyer, Zum Streit, p. 123.
26 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Kant’s Psychologie, Dargestellt und Erörtert (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1870). All references in parentheses are to this edition. Also important for Meyer’s interpretation is his Einladungsschrift in Bonn, Kant’s Ansicht über die Psychologie als Wissenschaft (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1869). This is a separate work, providing a different exposition of the standpoint of the larger work.
27 Cohen wrote a surprisingly favourable review of Meyer’s book, Kant’s Psychologie. See Hermann Cohen, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft VII (1871), 320–330. See Chapter 13, Section 5.
28 See Kuno Fischer, ‘Die beiden kantischen Schulen in Jena’, in Akademische Reden (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862), p. 99.
29 See Chapter 1, Sections 2 and 7. Meyer probably did not know that Fries gave such importance to this text. He maintains, incorrectly, that Fries did not think Kant had an explicit conception of an empirical method (p. 143).
30 On this topic, see also Chapter 1, Section 11.
31 Kant, Logik, ‘Einleitung’, AA IX, 14.
32 But as we have seen in Chapter 1, Section 11, this is not really Fries’ account of logic. Fries distinguishes transcendental from purely logical principles.
33 See Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), §12, 136–138 and §13, 145–148; Streiftschriften (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1857), pp. 9–15; and Mikrokosmus (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1884), 4th edition, (first published 1856) Vol. I, 188–215. See Trendelenburg, ‘Ueber die metaphysische Hauptpunkte in Herbart’s Psychologie’ in Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie (Berlin: Bethge, 1867), III, 97–121. Meyer himself refers to all these sources.
34 See Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (Königsberg: Unzer, 1816), Sämtliche Werke IV, 310–312; §§13–15,
35 Jürgen Bona Meyer, Zeitfragen. Populäre Aufsätze (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1870). The second edition appeared in 1874. All references in parentheses above are to the first edition.
36 Meyer, Zeitfragen: Kap. I. Die Philosophie und unsere Zeit’, pp. 1–14; and ‘Die Philosophische Systeme und die Zukunft der Philosophie’, pp. 407–434.
37 See Meyer, Zeitfragen, Kapitel 8: ‘Der Wille und seine Freiheit’, pp. 205–278.
38 See Meyer, ‘Zum neuesten Stand des Streits über Leib und Seele. II. Die Lehre von der Willensfreiheit im Materialismus und Idealismus’ Deutsches Museum, Nr. 51. December 18, 1856, 906–916; and ‘III. Willensfreiheit und Sittengesetz’, Deutsches Museum, Nr. 10, March 5, 1857, 345–358.
39 Meyer, ‘Die Lehre von der Willensfreiheit’, p. 911.
40 Meyer, ‘Willensfreiheit und Sittengesetz’, p. 354.
41 Meyer, ‘Die Lehre von der Willensfreiheit’, p. 714.
42 Meyer will deal with Schopenhauer in two other writings, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch und Denker (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1872), and Weltelend und Weltschmerz: eine Rede gegen Schopenhauer’s und Hartmann’s Pessimismus gehalten im wissenschaftlichen Verein zu Berlin (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1872).
44 Meyer, ‘Willensfreiheit und Sittengesetz’, p. 348.
45 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen (Stuttgart: Insel, 1968) I, 396, §55.
46 See David Friedrich Strauβ, Die christlichen Glaubenslehre (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1840), I, 503–504, 507, 588.
47 Meyer, Zeitfragen, ‘Religion und Philosophie in unserer Zeit’, pp. 353–406.
48 See Chapter 1, Section 10.
49 See Meyer’s Voltaire und Rousseau, pp. 11, 20.
50 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883); and Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft: Rede zum Antritt des Rektorats des Kaiser-Wilhelm Universität Strassburg, gehalten am 1 Mai 1894 (Strassburg: Heitz, 1894).
51 Jürgen Bona Meyer, ‘Neue Versuche einer Philosophie der Geschichte’, Historische Zeitschrift 25 (1871), 303–378.
52 Meyer reviews the following works: 1) Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmus, Band III (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1864); 2) Conrad Hermann, Prolegomena zur Philosophie der Geschichte (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1849) and Zwölf Vorlesungen über Philosophie der Geschichte (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1870); 3) Heinrich Rückert, Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte in organischer Darstellung (Leipzig: Härtel, 1857); 4) Christian Bunsen, Gott in der Geschichte (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857–1858); 5) Erst von Lasaulx, Neue Versuch alten auf die Wahrheit der Thatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte (Munich: Cotta, 1856); 6) Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: J.W. Parker & Son, 1857–1861) in the German translation by Arnold Ruge, Geschichte der Civilisation in England (Leipzig: Winter, 1868); 7) F. Laurent, Philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Librarie Internationale, 1870); 8) John Stuart Mill, System der deductiven und inductiven Logik, trans. J. Schiel (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1862–1863); 9) Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris: Bachelier, 1830–1842) and Systeme de politique positive (Paris: Mathias, 1851–1854); 10) Moritz Lazarus, ‘Einleitende Gedanken über Völkerpsychologie’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie 1 (1860) 1–73; ‘Verdichtung des Denkens in der Geschichte’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie 2 (1862), 54–62; ‘Ueber das Verhältniß des Einzelnen zur Gesammtheit’, in Das Leben der Seele (Berlin: Dümmler, 1883), 321–411, ‘Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Völkerpsychologie’ in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie 3 (1865), 1–94.
53 See Meyer’s Kant’s Ansicht über die Psychologie, pp. 30–36.