john mcdowell's mind and world, and early romantic epistemology revue internationale de philosophie

8/3/2019 JOHN McDOWELL'S MIND AND WORLD, AND EARLY ROMANTIC EPISTEMOLOGY Revue internationale de philosophie

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JOHN McDOWELL'S MIND AND WORLD, AND EARLYROMANTIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Andrew BOWIE (Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge)

It is a further sign of a welcome change in the international philosophical climate when

another eminent analytical philosopher, John McDowell, publishes an important and

provocative book in which names from the Continental tradition like Hegel and Gadamer

figure almost as prominently as those of Gareth Evans or W.V. Quine. McDowell's move

beyond the analytical canon follows other recent examples of this change in climate, such

as Michael Dummett's concern with Husserl, Bernard Williams' interest in Nietzsche and

the increasingly hermeneutic assumptions of some of the work of Hilary Putnam and

Donald Davidson. The growing interest in ideas from the Continental tradition on the part

of certain leading analytical philosophers has, however, so far largely been directed at

already fairly familiar figures like Hegel, Nietzsche and Gadamer. As a way of

suggesting a further perspective on this new dialogue between the traditions, I want in the

following to offer a reading of some of McDowell's Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.,

London: Harvard University Press 1994, cit. MW) which suggests both how its concernsecho aspects of early Romantic epistemology and how some Romantic ideas might be

used to question certain of McDowell's contentions.1

One obvious reason for the echoes of Romantic concerns in McDowell's book is

that his major points of orientation are Kant and Hegel, whose positions he sees, in line

with Robert Pippin, as less incompatible than is often thought, Hegel being concerned to

complete a 'Kantian project' (Pippin cited in MW p. 111). McDowell thereby tends to

reinforce the idea that the move from Kant to Hegel via German Idealism and early

Romanticism consists of the working through of a series of untenable attempts to deal

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with central Kantian problems, which are then largely resolved by Hegel. However, one

of the main contentions of recent research into early Romanticism is that Hegel's

Absolute Idealism was not in fact the culminating solution to key post-Kantian dilemmas,

and that arguments already proposed by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, some of which

reappear in a different guise in the later Schelling's critique of Hegel, can be used toquestion even the re-interpretations of Hegel that have appeared in the work of Klaus

Hartmann, Alan White, Terence Pinkard and others.2 To these Hegelian positions one can

now add McDowell's, although much depends here upon what one takes to be the

essential aspect of a Hegelian, as opposed to a Romantic position. Aspects of the contrast

between the Hegelian and Romantic approaches have been echoed in many contemporary

philosophical debates, both analytical and continental. This fact alone ought, I hope, to be

sufficient reason for suggesting that the Romantic positions are, some two hundred years

after their emergence, still philosophically alive and worth bringing into contemporary

debate, even apart from their intrinsic historical interest.

The approach I shall adopt here is, though, open to paradigmatic objections from

two ends of the philosophical spectrum. On the one hand, a 'problem-solving' analytical

approach will maintain that there is no reason to take a detour through Romantic

philosophy, and that arguments for and against McDowell should be stated without the

complex interpretative manoeuvres required to translate between such disparate styles of

thought. On the other, some hermeneuticists will insist, as Frederick Beiser has against

my work on Schelling (Bowie op. cit. 1993, 1994) -- which took a very similar line to the

approach I shall adopt here -- that in relation to philosophy from the past one should beconcerned with 'the internal understanding and criticism of a text', taking the author in

'his own right', 'as a whole' and in his own context, in order to avoid distortion of what the

author meant (Frederick C. Beiser, 'Bowie on Schelling' in Bulletin of the Hegel Society

of Great Britain 30 (1994) p. 2--3).

Neither an exclusively analytical nor such an exclusively 'hermeneutic' position

seems to me to have much merit.3 Purely analytical approaches already look shaky in the

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light of the fact that McDowell's opposition in MW to the reductionism of the

contemporary forms of scientistic 'bald naturalism' that dominate certain parts of

analytical philosophy draws on a re-interpretation of Kant and on the introduction of

Hegel into some of the more exclusive preserves of analytical debate. McDowell thereby

assumes that resources from the past offer new approaches to contemporary problemswhich seem intractable when considered within contemporary frameworks. Beiser's kind

of hermeneutic approach must answer two obvious questions. First, how is one to avoid

what Herbert Schndelbach has termed 'morbus hermeneuticus', in which 'the

philologisation of philosophy turns means into ends and the medium into the content of

philosophy' (Herbert Schndelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1987

p. 283)? Schndelbach rightly maintains that 'one should ask the historical

hermeneuticists why one should also have the hermeneutic problems which they have

with the philosopher X' (ibid. p. 284). Without such an ability to include oneself in the

process of hermeneutic reflection one becomes subject to a historicism which tries to

isolate the history of philosophy from philosophy now, as though one's contemporary

interpretation of past philosophy were in fact like Ranke's untenable view of history 'as it

really was' or like the bad literary critic's interpretation of 'what the author really meant'.

Second, where does one locate the temporal divide between those philosophers to whom

one gives Beiser's hermeneutic treatment and those to whom one does not? Is one, for

example, to take McDowell merely 'on his own terms', reconstruct his historical context,

and read him 'as a whole', or does he have to be dead for a certain number of years?

In the case of the Romantics far more philological work needs to be done beforewe can begin an adequate assessment of much of their philosophy. At what point, though,

do we become aware that we 'know enough' for Romantic philosophy to become part of

contemporary debate, and must we wait until then before engaging with it in the

philosophical manner that all but the most fanatical contextualist assumes is justified, for

example, in relation to Kant? To cut a long story short, I think that a self-correcting

interplay between hermeneutico-philological and argumentative approaches is probably

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the best we can ever really achieve. The really interesting question in approaching the

present topic in this way is why such striking analogies emerge between the concerns of

contemporary philosophy and the still largely forgotten philosophy of Romanticism.

What exactly, then, makes me want to relate McDowell to Romantic epistemology?

SPONTANEITY, RECEPTIVITY AND THE GROUND OF KNOWLEDGE

Both McDowell and the philosophers of the early Romantic period are concerned in

closely analogous ways with the question of how to ground what we hold true of the

world. The return of this concern as a central topic within contemporary American

philosophy is to a large extent a reaction against the proliferation of naturalistic attempts

to reduce epistemological questions to questions of cognitive science. In the later 18th

century in Germany the analogous reaction was against a particular understanding of the

implications of Spinoza's system: in both cases the theories being reacted against have

powerful support in aspects of natural science, but they are questionable because of their

failure to answer important metaphysical questions about the relationship between

subjectivity and the rest of nature. The fact is that the structures involved in statements of

the issues in question are sometimes virtually identical between the contemporary

thinkers cited by McDowell and the philosophers of the Romantic period. Discussing the

problem of grounding, McDowell cites as one of his key targets Davidson's assertion that

'nothing can count as the reason for holding a belief except another belief' (Donald

Davidson, 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', in ed. Ernest Lepore, Truthand Interpretation, Oxford: Blackwell 1986 p. 310). One of McDowell's goals is to show

that this leads to a 'coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality' (MW p.

24). What lies behind this remark is, as we shall see, a problem already revealed by F.H.

Jacobi, which German Idealism attempted to answer, and which Romantic philosophy

will approach in a manner that rejects essential elements of German Idealism. The initial

proximity of Jacobi to McDowell becomes evident when the latter talks of the worry that

'What we wanted to conceive of as exercises of concepts threaten to degenerate into

moves in a self-contained game' (ibid. p. 5); in his Jacobi an Fichte of 1799 Jacobimaintains against Fichte's idealism that 'Our sciences, merely considered as such, are

games which the human spirit thinks up to pass the time' (Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,

Jacobi an Fichte, Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes 1799 p. 24).4 In both cases the question is

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what sort of a ground one can give to conceptual knowledge if it is not to seem to be cast

adrift from an emphatic sense of the real. Hegel's answer to this problem will, as we shall

see, be to try to escape the necessity of a ground at the beginning of philosophy; the way

he tries to do this has certain things in common with Romantic thought, but ultimately

relies upon a conception which Romantic arguments can used to question.In a formulation which will in a moment take us to the heart of the late 18th

century debate Davidson elsewhere asserts that 'our only evidence for a belief is other

beliefs; this is not merely the logical situation, but also the pragmatic situation. And since

no belief is self-certifying, none can supply a certain basis for the rest' (Davidson

'Empirical Content' in ed. Lepore op. cit. p. 331). In relation to an occurrence in the world

'it is the belief that is properly called the evidence, not the event' (ibid.), because only the

belief, qua interpretation of a state of affairs, has claims to be able to become truth-

determinate. Davidson is led to his assertions by his rejection of what Wilfrid Sellars has

termed the 'Myth of the Given', the myth in which the problem of grounding knowledge

is seen as being solved by 'bare presences that are supposed to constitute the ultimate

grounds of empirical judgements' (MW p. 24): these 'presences' are what is assumed by

bald naturalism to be 'self-certifying'. In the 'Myth of the Given' 'presences' are 'outside

the conceptual realm altogether' (ibid. p. 25). They are therefore meant to escape the

merely sui generis status of the spontaneously generated contents of the 'space of

reasons', in which the formulation of theories and truth claims takes place via our ability

to come up with new ways of accounting for aspects of the world by synthesising our

empirical concepts. In the Myth of the Given presences are supposed to extend the spaceof reasons by making it subject to 'impacts' which constrain it in ways that are beyond the

control of concepts and that can therefore alter concepts. How they do so will, in the

naturalist view, become finally intelligible once we have figured out the causal laws

which govern consciousness and language. The mythical status of this conception should

thereby already be apparent: how will we know when we have done this, unless we

presuppose the answer at the beginning, the answer, namely, that everything is explicable

in causal terms? There could, of course, hardly be a more dogmatic metaphysical

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conception, a fact that already suggests why this position often comes close to 18th

century interpretations of Spinoza (cf. Andrew Bowie, 'Romanticism and Technology' in

Radical Philosophy 72 1995 pp. 5--16).

How, then, is it possible to give an intelligible account of thought's being

constrained by a reality which is not merely subject to the freedom inherent in thought,without giving up the requirement that the truth about reality must be located in a space

of reasons, and thus in some sense within thought? Davidson's coherentism, McDowell

argues, rejects the idea that we can articulate a grounding relationship between the space

of reasons, and the 'realm of law' in nature, even as it assumes that the realm of law and

the space of reasons are ultimately inseparable. The latter assumption is the basis of

Davidson's 'anomalous monism': that brain events and mental events are inseparable is,

for Davidson, beyond question, but 'no purely physical predicate, no matter how

complex, has, as a matter of law, the same extension as a mental predicate' (Donald

Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980 p. 215). 5

Autonomy of the mental is thereby sustained at the same time as the assumption of

natural determinism.

McDowell's question is whether this relationship between the two aspects of our

being is able to explain how it is that the world is intelligible to us: if the realm of

causality and the space of reasons cannot be shown to relate in any determinate way, how

can we be sure our knowledge is of independent reality? This question has frequent

echoes in the Romantic period. In the Introduction to: Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of

1797 Schelling maintains, for example:

The question is not whether and how that connection of appearances and the

sequence of causes and effects which we call the course of nature has become

real outside ourselves, but how it has become real for us, how that system and

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that connection of appearances found the way to our mind, and how they

gained that certainty in our thinking with which we are absolutely compelled

to think of them? (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Smmtliche Werke,

ed. K.F.A. Schelling, I Abtheilung Vols. 1-10, II Abtheilung Bde. 1-4,

Stuttgart, 1856-61, I/2 p. 30).

McDowell thinks that his own position can overcome the deficits of Davidsonian

coherentism and the problem posed by Schelling without 'a vain appeal to the Given'

(MW p. 24) which is beyond the realm of conceptuality, because: 'Experience enables the

layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks' (ibid. p. 26).6

The viability of his project depends upon the legitimation of the claim that there is a

rational influence of experience upon what we hold true. McDowell explains this in

Kantian terms, by the claim that what passive receptivity gives to us must already be

structured by spontaneity, or as Putnam puts it, by the claim that we should 'think of

perception as an exercise of our conceptual powers, and not merely of our sense organs'

(Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism, Oxford: Blackwell 1995 p. 66).

McDowell's project amounts to nothing less than reconciling 'reason and nature'

(MW p. 86), a project which is, of course, the aim of German Idealism, and which is seen

by some, including McDowell himself, as being achieved, at least in principle, in Hegel's

Absolute Idealism. A great deal will depend upon exactly how this claim is to be

interpreted: the refusal to separate reason and nature is also part of early Romantic

philosophy, but there is avant la lettre a crucial difference in that philosophy from Hegel'sidealism. McDowell's reference to Hegel is, one should add, only to the Hegel of the

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Phenomenology,7and he never engages with the problem of the relationship between the

Phenomenology, the Logic and the rest of Hegel's system.8 However, for my purposes, it

is enough that he seems to accept Hegel's notion that the Absolute is accessible to what

German Idealism and Romanticism term 'reflection'.

In 'reflection' thinking's recognition of its ability to transcend its apparentlimitations, which comes about via insight into the relative, 'finite' status of particular

determinate thoughts about things in the world and into how these limitations mutually

condition each other, leads it to the position where nothing need be left outside the

conceptual realm, because what is apparently the other of thought can eventually be seen

to be inseparable from thought. Dieter Henrich characterises the relationship of Hegel's

Absolute to determinate knowledge as follows: 'The Absolute is the finite to the extent to

which the finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself' (Dieter Henrich,

Selbstverhltnisse, Stuttgart: Reclam 1982 p. 160). The finite is 'negative relation to itself'

in that, if it is to know itself, it must be able to reflect itself in that which is not, in the

way I need the other of the mirror to appear to myself. The contradiction between

concepts in the spontaneous space of reasons and the material provided by passive

'receptivity' is therefore revealed as merely apparent and as resolvable via thought's

ability to show how it is 'of the object' in both the subjective and the objective genitive.

The very fact of awareness of the limitations of empirical thought therefore becomes

what gives rise to the 'infinite' in Hegel's particular sense, which is thought that is

bounded by itself and by nothing else.

Gadamer instructively makes the Hegelian point in a remark on what he sees asthe basic contention of twentieth century phenomenology, which is thoroughly consistent

with the direction of McDowell's argument:9 'The image that we have of things is ...

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generally the manner in which the things themselves are conscious to us' (Hans-Georg

Gadamer, Neuere Philosophie 1. Hegel Husserl Heidegger, Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1987

p. 106). The conceptual is, therefore, in McDowell's terms, 'unbounded' -- 'infinite' in the

sense just suggested -- because what might appear to be outside it is, properly understood,

actually still within it. This is possible because 'the deliverances of receptivity alreadydraw on capacities that belong to spontaneity' (MW p. 41), which means that spontaneity

and receptivity cannot be wholly separate and thus that the world and the subject mediate

each other in a way in which there can be no final separation between the two. While

agreeing that such a separation between spontaneity and receptivity is untenable, Novalis

(and later Schelling) will reveal a structure which can be used to question McDowell's

use of this claim to legitimate Absolute Idealism.

The Romantics' recognition of the problem McDowell wishes to overcome is

evident in the following fairly typical examples, from among many others. Novalis says

in the so-called 'Fichte Studies' of 1795--6: 'True -- derivation from whren [keep,

preserve] -- perceive (Wahrnehmen) -- grasp persistently. / Taking -- is active receptivity'

(Novalis, Band 2 Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mhl, Munich

Vienna: Hanser 1978 p. 123, cit. Novalis PTW), and 'Active passivity, or determining

determinability must therefore be the appearance of freedom in the realm of the object'

(ibid. p. 112). In a 1796 text 'On Beauty in Literature' Friedrich Schlegel, in line with

McDowell's contention that 'We must not suppose that receptivity makes an even

notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity' (MW p. 41),

maintains that:

Appearance has degrees, but no absolute maximum.

The grasping of what is given demands spontaneity, one's own exertion, own

activity. The smaller is the quantity of spontaneity which the grasping of the

appearance demands, the more the appearance appears. There are no absolute

maxima on either side; without any spontaneity there is no receptivity: and if

all receptivity stopped, then the appearance would cease to be appearance and

become a concept, for pure spontaneity. The sign would disappear and thething would step into its place (Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und

Fragmente, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh 1988 Band 5 p. 170).

The 'sign' is the thing as phenomenon, which would be replaced by the thing in itself, in

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the manner of the notion of 'intellectual intuition' qua 'intuitus originarius' rejected by

Kant, for which God's intuition could be regarded as generating the real thing out of

itself. Schlegel arrives at these formulations via his study of Fichte, whose different and

important notion of intellectual intuition will concern us in a moment. In the light of

Novalis' and Schlegel's remarks, and of McDowell's claim to reconcile 'reason andnature', the legitimacy of considering MW in relation to the wider Romantic context of

Hegel's philosophy should hopefully now be beyond question.

THE SPACE OF REASONS AND THE REALM OF LAW

Let us, then, begin to make a rough translation of more of the issues here into the terms of

late 18th and early 19th century German philosophy, in order to see if, by widening the

debate, one arrives at new insight. The contemporary 'bald naturalist' adherents of the

'Myth of the Given', who think 'we can reconstruct the structure of the space of reasons

out of conceptual materials that already belong in a natural-scientific depiction of nature'

(MW p. 73) are a non-theological strain of what Kant termed 'dogmatists', who are, as we

shall see, generally associated with Spinoza. 'Bald naturalists' assume the realm of law

will in the last analysis even be determining for the functioning of thought. The

coherentists like Davidson (and the more hermeneutic Rorty) are in some ways, but not

others, analogous to the Romantics, because they do not see any final way of articulating

the relationship between the space of reasons and the realm of law, 10 and McDowell

occupies a position somewhere between Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.11McDowell's worries about coherentism are prefigured in Jacobi's contention in his

critique of Kant of 1787 -- which echoes Davidson's contentions about beliefs -- that in

Kantian terms: 'all our knowledge is nothing but a consciousness of linked determinations

of our own self, on the basis of which one cannot infer to anything else' (Friedrich

Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume ber den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus ein

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Gesprch, Breslau: Gottl. Lwe 1787 p. 225). If Kant is not to be an idealist he must

explain how the space of reasons is not constituted just by mind somehow affecting itself.

However, his manner of doing so is, Jacobi maintains, very dubious:

For even if according to [Kantian philosophy] it can be admitted that atranscendental something may correspond as cause to these merely subjective

beings [Wesen, by which he means appearances], which are only

determinations of our own being, it yet remains hidden in the deepest

obscurity where this cause and what the nature of the relation it has to its

effect is (ibid. p. 224).

McDowell wishes to get away from exactly this aspect of Kant, in which 'receptivity

figures as a susceptibility to the impact of a supersensible reality' (MW p. 41). He

maintains, in line with other aspects of Kantian thought, that

the items that institute the sui generis spontaneity related concepts have a

location in the realm of law. But the concepts are sui generis precisely in that

it is not by virtue of their location in the realm of law that things instantiate

those concepts (ibid. p. 75--6).

In a very similar vein, which confirms the aptness of this historical link, Hilary Putnam

raises what is in fact Jacobi's contention against the Kant of noumenal causality againstRorty's claim that we are connected to the world 'causally not semantically'. Putnam

claims that 'Rorty's picture is ... a materialist version of Kant's transcendental

metaphysics' (Hilary Putnam, Words and Life Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard

University Press 1994 p. 287), precisely because the nature of the causality which gives

rise to the intelligibility of representations, as opposed to the fact of sensory stimulation,

is left wholly in the dark in Rorty's eliminative materialist concern to get rid of any trace

of idealist metaphysics.

The avoidance of the notion of an inarticulable causality of the noumenal is, ofcourse, also what Hegel's Absolute Idealism is intended to achieve, and Fichte, Schelling

and the early Romantics all reject an absolute separation between the phenomenal and the

noumenal. Schelling will, for example, criticise Kant in 1833--4 for the fact that he 'does

not allow [the] noumenal realm, as he calls it, any direct relationship to intelligence, to

nous, to the real knowing faculty, but instead to our merely material senses' (F.W.J.

Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, translation and introduction by Andrew


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Bowie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994 p. 102; German in Schelling, op.

cit. I/10 p. 84). Jacobi's concern, which helps initiate both German Idealism and

Romanticism, is with how we can get beyond the potentially solipsistic implications of

coherentism to a philosophical account of the fact of being's intelligibility which cannot,

for reasons to be explained in a moment, be made comprehensible in cognitive terms.12

Even though their aims are different in quite decisive ways, some of McDowell's

principal concerns do clearly echo those of Jacobi. Jacobi arrives at his position as a way

of avoiding the problem in idealism that what is held to be true of the world can only be

corrected from within thought, without there being any sense in which the truth might be

determined by a reality which transcends the contingency of subjective representations.

McDowell sees the answer to this as follows:

How things are is independent of one's thinking (except, of course, in the

special case in which how things are is that one thinks such-and-such). By

being taken in in experience, how things anyway are becomes available to

exert the required rational control originating outside one's thinking, on one's

exercises of spontaneity (MW p. 27).

The vital question is the position from which one can legitimately claim that one's

spontaneity is subject to 'rational control' from 'experience', thus that the relationship of

mind and world ultimately bears no mysteries for philosophy.

Importantly, in the present context, the special case 'in which how things are isthat one thinks such-and-such' is part of what Fichte means by 'intellectual intuition',13

'that through which I know something because I do it' (J.G. Fichte, Werke I, Berlin: de

Gruyter 1971 p. 463). For Fichte this moment of immediate certainty, the necessity of

which derives in part from his attempt to answer questions posed by Jacobi, is the 'sole

firm standpoint for all philosophy' (ibid. p. 466), and this leads him to vital questions

about the nature of our experience of the real. The term intellectual intuition itself implies

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that spontaneity, the activity of the intellect, and receptivity, 'intuition' in roughly Kant's

sense, cannot be finally separate. All our acts, Fichte maintains, rely upon intellectual

intuition: 'only via this intuition do I know that I am performing the act, only via this

intuition do I distinguish my acting and myself in the action from the object of the action'

(ibid. p. 463). As such there must be an irreflexive aspect of self-consciousness if I am tobe aware of my actions and thoughts as being mine, or, for that matter, be conscious of

the object which is not myself as not being myself.14 What McDowell thinks is merely an

isolated special case is, for Fichte, part of the very possibility of taking things in in

experience.

One of the vital differences between the Romantics, and Hegel and McDowell,

will be that the latter have no place for a pre- or irreflexive aspect of the subject of

cognition. McDowell's assumption of the reflexive constitution of the subject is apparent

in his claim that: 'We must take subjectivity and the concept of objectivity to emerge

together, out of initiation into the space of reasons' (MW p. 186). Subjectivity therefore

emerges via interaction with the other. It is worth already pointing out here that the status

of that which 'emerges' by its being 'initiated' is thereby left completely opaque. In

McDowell's sense subjectivity is supposed to be always already 'mediated', rather than, as

in Fichte, entailing an 'immediate' aspect; the same thing, importantly, applies to the

object-world. This contention is the basis of the unboundedness of the conceptual,

because there is nothing in 'objectivity' which is not a result of the interaction of mind

and world in which both are always already involved. For McDowell, as Hegel also

argues, subjectivity and objectivity can therefore be thought of as grounding each other,without there being any need for a further ground. The Romantic question will be

whether the position from which this can be asserted could actually be philosophically

legitimated, rather than postulated as the goal of philosophy, which may not be attainable.

The reasons why the Romantics arrive at their questioning of the position common to

Hegel and McDowell have to do with other arguments that emerge most clearly in

responses to paradigmatic questions posed by Jacobi.

Jacobi's influential reading of Spinoza in the 'Pantheism Controversy',15 articulates

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the structure of the main issues. In 'Beylage VII' of the Spinoza Letters, which he added

in the second 1789 edition of the text, Jacobi maintains that 'all the things which reason

can bring out by dissection, linking, judging, concluding, and grasping again are simply

things of nature, and reason itself belongs as a limited being with these things' (in ed.

Heinrich Scholz, Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi undMendelssohn, Berlin: Reuther and Reichard 1916 p. 274; originally in Friedrich Heinrich

Jacobi, ber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn von

F.H. Jacobi, Breslau: Lwe 1789). This conception of the knowledge generated by the

understanding can give no guarantee that our thought does not just involve McDowell's

rejected vision of a 'coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality' (MW

p. 24): the space of reasons appears either merely narcissistically concerned with itself or

unable to ground itself, which leads to a scepticism concerning whether knowledge can

really be said to be about a true world at all.

The 'bald naturalist' response to this perceived dilemma is to suggest that the laws

at which thought arrives by 'dissection, linking, judging, concluding, and grasping again',

or in McDowell's terms 'the relations that constitute the structure of the space of reasons,

relations of justification and the like' (MW p. 73), will eventually be able to explain

thought as precisely just a 'thing of nature' -- what Jacobi terms a 'conditioned condition'

-- because thought is itself ultimately bound by the scientific laws of 'disenchanted

nature'. The circularity of the naturalist claim is exactly what is at issue here: how does

one ground claims to knowledge without either reverting to a coherentist idealism or a

reductive physicalism? This is, of course, another version of the problem of therelationship between the 'ideal' and the 'real' that is the focus of German Idealism and

Romanticism.

Jacobi rejects the late 18th century analogue of the naturalist position, which is

represented by part of his interpretation of Spinoza, because it fails to take account of a

crucial distinction. This distinction is also involved in what makes McDowell reject the

notion of 'bare presences':

if everything which is supposed to arise and be present in a manner which we

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, , . , :

1996, , , : 1996.


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15

can comprehend has to arise and be present in a conditioned manner; then we

remain, as long as we comprehend, in a chain of conditioned conditions.

Where this chain ceases we cease to comprehend and the context which we

call nature itself also ceases (in ed. Scholz op. cit. p. 276).

If we rely on naturalistically conceived 'bare presences' we rely, in these terms, on

something which is never in fact really present at all, because the presence of an aspect of

nature as itself, as opposed to as a merely indeterminate sensory input, depends upon its

relations to other things, upon its location in a 'chain of conditioned conditions'. In order

to deal with this problem philosophy must deal with the question of what is

'unconditioned', which is where the space of reasons must be located, and which is what

makes possible the linking of a chain of conditions as something intelligible.

Despite other evident differences between Jacobi and himself, and despite the

apparently obsolete vocabulary, Jacobi's basic insight leads, then, to what McDowell

intends by his highlighting the difference of the space of reasons from 'disenchanted

nature' and his attempt to redefine their relationship. McDowell's claim is that 'we can

equate nature with the realm of law, but deny that nature so conceived is utterly

disenchanted' (MW p. 73), because our 'animal nature' -- our sensibility, unlike that of

other animals -- involves spontaneous 'conceptual powers' (ibid. p. 74). The question he

thereby tries to answer is how to avoid both a sceptical regress of the kind pointed to by

Jacobi, and the need to presuppose something which cannot, if the cognitive realm is

thought of as always constituted solely by 'chains of conditions', be legitimated inepistemological terms, for lack of a final ground of certainty. What is required both in

McDowell's argument and in the structure revealed by Jacobi is a ground which would

prevent the regress of 'beliefs about beliefs', thus a ground for how we are to legitimate

truth claims. The Kantian, German Idealist and Romantic responses to this problem all

rely in some form upon the assumption of the spontaneity of the subject, the very

meaning of the term 'spontaneity' suggesting that it is somehow 'unconditioned', because

it is 'cause/condition of itself'. The question towards which I am moving is, then, whether

McDowell's Hegelian account of the subject does all the work it needs to for his claims tobe substantiated.

SCHEMATISM

Doubts about the status of philosophy's account of the spontaneity of the subject will lead

the Romantics to some of their most significant positions. In order to see why, we need


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now to consider a rather surprising omission on McDowell's part, which will bring us to a

consideration of how the Hegelian and Romantic positions diverge. McDowell's attempt

to show that 'the deliverances of receptivity already draw on capacities that belong to

spontaneity' can also be seen as a way of trying to answer a notorious Kantian dilemma.

This is suggested by the fact that McDowell derived his initial questions about mind andworld from Davidson's rejection of the 'scheme/content' division in philosophy.16

The dilemma Kant became aware of has to do with the most vital aspect of the

space of reasons. Attempts to give an account of the functioning of judgement lead, Kant

maintains, to the following situation with respect to the rules of cognition:

If judgement wanted to show universally how one is to subsume under these

rules, i.e. distinguish whether something belongs under the rule or not, this

could only happen via a further rule. But because this is a rule it requires once

more an instruction by judgement, and thus it is shown to be the case that the

understanding is admittedly capable of being instructed and equipped by

rules, but that judgement is a particular talent which cannot be given by

instruction but can only be practised (KrV B p. 172, A, p. 133).

In Kant's terms, then, having learned a cognitive rule in the space of reasons we can judge

that an x given in intuition is a case of it, but there is no rule to tell us that the rule we

apply is the one appropriate to x. Kant therefore invokes an capacity of the subject which

itself does not allow of a further grounding in terms of rules, because such groundingwould lead to a regress of rules for the application of rules, and so on. The 'talent'

required to prevent a regress of rules for rules depends on a 'hidden art in the depths of

the human soul' which will, Kant asserts, probably remain inaccessible to us. There is

then, for Kant, an essential opacity inherent in an ineluctable aspect of the subject's

spontaneous 'talent' for judgement, which is the condition of 'experience' in both Kant's

and McDowell's sense.

The talent in question is, of course, 'schematism':

This idea of a universal procedure of imagination to provide a concept with

its image I call the schema to this concept. Indeed it is not images of the

objects which underlie our purely sensuous concepts, but schemata (KrV B p.

179--180, A p. 140--1).

16 .


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17

The schema gives an initial coherence to particular intuitions, so that they can be

identified by general concepts, even though there will always be differences between the

occurrences of those intuitions: the contingent patterns of stimuli we receive are, one

presumes, never wholly identical at any two points in one's life.17 In the System ofTranscendental Idealism of 1800, written while he was in close contact with Schlegel and

Novalis in Jena, Schelling says of Kant's schema: 'The schema ... is not an idea

(Vorstellung) that is determined on all sides, but an intuition of the rule according to

which a particular object can be produced' (Schelling op. cit., I/3 p. 508). As 'intuition' --

in the sense of immediate givenness -- rather than as knowledge of a rule the schema

cannot itself be cognitively determined: for that, as Kant made clear, intuitions need

concepts.18 The functioning of judgement consequently relies upon an aspect of

spontaneity which cannot be conceptually articulated, because if it were to be brought

under a concept it would lose its mediating status between intuitions and concepts,

receptivity and spontaneity. This point will be vital for Novalis and its development by

Schleiermacher will be the basis of my conclusion.

The introduction of the notion of schematism is echoed in McDowell's claim that

sensuousness already involves spontaneity: 'When we trace justifications back, the last

thing we come to is still a thinkable content; not something more ultimate than that, a

bare pointing to the Given' (MW p. 28--9), thus neither an indeterminate sensory input

nor a 'pure presence', but rather a schema which is already proto-conceptual. McDowell,

then, like Kant, tries to mediate between supposedly separate realms. How, though, arewe able to establish that one realm, spontaneity, is able to enter into intuition -- a form of

access which entails some kind of 'intellectual intuition' -- short of just presupposing that

this must be the case if knowledge is to be finally grounded? This question will be part of

what Kant tries unsuccessfully to deal with in the transcendental deduction. Schlegel sees

this problem as follows: 'Kant does not begin with the fact; there IS experience ... but

with the unproven proposition that must be proved, that there MUST BE experience ...

17 , , .

18

( , , :

1989 . 28). , , :

( .

., /3 . 509).


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18

But this proposition must really be proved' (Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre

(1796-1828) (Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe Volume 18), Munich, Paderborn,

Vienna: Ferdinand Schningh 1963 p. 20--1). In order for McDowell to establish that

'Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a

subject thinks' there must be a fully articulated answer to the question of how experience,in Kant's strong sense of that which has been ordered by the rules of the space of reasons,

is constituted. Kant himself had great difficulty with this issue, as his account of the

'imagination' in the First Critique and his writing of the Critique of Judgement makes

clear.

It becomes apparent that what Kant refers to as schematism plays a role in

McDowell's conception when he maintains in phenomenological vein against Quine that

'What one goes on in arriving at one's picture of the world is not the stimulation of one's

sensory receptors, experience as Quine officially conceives it, but how things appear to

one, which belongs in a quite different conception of experience' (MW p. 135). 'How

things appear to one' is constituted in what Heidegger terms the 'as-structure of

understanding', which can, crucially, involve both what is rule-bound and, e.g. in the case

of new metaphors, what is spontaneous. In an important essay on this issue David Bell

has termed schematism a 'rule-determined spontaneity' (David Bell, 'The Art of

Judgement', Mind XCVI 1987 p. 222) because its origin is in the imagination, which

Kant -- sometimes, at least -- sees as part of sensuousness, but its functioning is the basis

of the understanding, which involves both the rule-governed apprehension and the

spontaneity inherent in judgement. Bell insists, initially in line with the contentions ofMcDowell, that one 'cannot assume that objects are given as such in experience [which

would be the Myth of the Given]; for the possibility of the concept of an object in general

is precisely what requires explanation' (Bell op. cit. p. 228). The explanation takes place,

then, via the notion of schematism, which gives an initial cognitive form to that which

would otherwise have to be regarded as merely indeterminate sensory input.

Unlike McDowell, however, who makes little of this connection, Bell goes on to

insist that what lies behind the idea of schematism is inseparable from Kant's

development of the notion of judgement in relation to art in the Critique of Judgement(cit. KdU). This forms a further important connection of the issue of judgement to

Romantic philosophy. Novalis calls the imagination 'the wonderful sense that can replace

all other senses .... If the outer senses seem to be completely subject to mechanical laws --

then the imagination is obviously not bound to the presence of and the contact with

external stimuli' (Novalis PTW p. 423). One of the vital issues here is that, for the

Romantics, the 'space of reasons' is also the 'space of metaphors', which raises the


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problem of how to draw a firm line between the two aspects of this space. If the key

aspect of the space of reasons is the capacity for synthesis, the distinction between merely

metaphorical, and 'literal' syntheses becomes central, as the recent history of science from

Kuhn to Foucault has often suggested. I shall return to this issue at the end.

Now McDowell is not a 'metaphysical realist' because he seems, like Putnam, toaccept that there can be a multiplicity of true descriptions of aspects of the world, thus

that the world is not 'ready-made'. However, in such locutions as 'when the facts make

themselves manifest in experience' (MW p. 144) or 'an impression ... can be an appearing,

a circumstance constituted by the world's making an appearance to the subject' (MW p.

146) the metaphors he himself employs attribute a kind of agency to the world. Our very

comprehension of these metaphors can, though, which will be crucial to Novalis'

conception, only be a result of our inherent familiarity with our own spontaneity, which,

in a way we have yet to examine, must be part of the ground of the cognitive self. Being

familiar with our own spontaneity must, as Fichte insisted, be prior to any sense in which

we can talk of the world in such terms, otherwise it is impossible to explain how one

would experience the resistance of the object world in intuition as resistance in the first

place. At the same time, though, as Novalis will suggest, the spontaneity must also --

precisely because we are part of the world -- be an aspect of the world: a world of nature

which does not involve more than causal relations could never give rise to the spontaneity

of the space of reasons.19 The alternative to this insistence on the irreducibility of

spontaneity is to make the Hegelian claim that subjectivity and objectivity ground each

other, so that I gain my awareness of my spontaneity solely from cognitive engagementwith the world. I shall return to this issue below in relation to Novalis, for the moment I

just want to suggest that this latter view of mind and world cannot be as transparent as

McDowell wishes to make it.

Bell maintains, in line with the Romantics, that it is when the imagination is free

to allow the capacity for schematism to remain at a level prior to conceptual

determination, in aesthetic experience, that it reveals most about its nature, namely via its

ability to see immediate non-conceptual significance, for example in an abstract painting

or a piece of music. Kant terms this capacity for criteria-free judgement 'reflective judgement', which does not function 'schematically, but technically' (KdU, Original

Introduction p. 26), where the former is regarded as part of the functioning of a

19

:

, .


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20

framework of rules and the latter as involving 'art', in a sense somewhere between 'craft'

or 'technique', and creative or productive ability.20 McDowell only makes the link to

aesthetics via Marx, claiming that 'Our very experience, in the aspect of its nature that

constitutes it as experience of the world, partakes of a salient condition of art, its freedom

from the need to be useful' (MW p. 119). The route from the Third Critique, viaRomanticism, to Marx and later to Heidegger and Critical Theory has, largely because of

its predominant orientation to the natural sciences, yet to penetrate the analytical canon in

any serious way. McDowell's version of these issues in MW pays no attention at all of the

Third Critique's account of judgement, and it is in this respect that some of the Romantic

objections become most obviously significant, as a further link between the traditions can

suggest.

In the light of the role of schematism in their arguments, it is not surprising that

both McDowell's and Bell's positions, apparently without their knowing it, are in

important ways very close to that of the early Heidegger, a fact which also brings them

close to the Romantics.21 This is immediately evident in McDowell's case via such proto-

Heideggerian locutions as 'the world's making itself manifest to us' (MW p. 143), 'our

20

( , , . ,

: 1977 . 81):

. , ,

: , , .,

: 1994 . 21 ( ,

. ., 5).

,

,

( , , : 1973).

21 ,

:

1920

1930. :

, , . .


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21

unproblematic openness to the world' (ibid. p. 155), and in his citing with approval what

he sees as Gareth Evans' (!) 'idea of the subject as being in the world' (ibid. p. 54).

McDowell's and Heidegger's views of Kant converge in what is intended in Heidegger's

claim that the 'Schematism Chapter' leads to the 'core of the whole problematic of the

Critique of Pure Reason' (Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, op.cit., p. 109), and thus of Kant's whole project. The problem is the status of Kant's

imagination: 'But if receptivity means the same as sensuousness and spontaneity the same

as understanding, then the imagination falls in a peculiar way between the two' (ibid. p.

124), because it must play the role of structuring receptivity by spontaneity demanded by

McDowell. In Being and Time, of course, the question of the temporal disclosure of

being is directly connected to the attempt in the 'Schematism Chapter' to link the two

realms of receptivity and spontaneity in the imagination (cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und

Zeit, Tbingen: Niemeyer 1979 p. 23).

It is Bell, though, who comes even closer to Heidegger, in a way that points to the

Romantic position which is most significant here. Bell's conclusion concerning the 'art of

judgement' is the following: 'That our thought conform to the rules, principles, concepts

and criteria constitutive of objectivity, but that it also be grounded in a spontaneous, blind

subjective awareness of intrinsic but inarticulable meaning -- these are not conflicting

requirements' (Bell op. cit. p. 241). As we saw, Bell thinks this awareness is best

understood via aesthetic responses to works of art. He thereby echoes Heidegger's notion

of the pre-theoretical world-disclosure which is the prior condition of the 'ontic' sciences

and which Heidegger comes in the 1930's, especially in the Origin of the Work of Art ,22

to regard as most accessible precisely in art's rendering aspects of the world intelligible in

ways which cannot be reduced to 'ontic' forms of explanation. Heidegger's point is not, it

should be remembered, that ontic explanations have no claims to truth, but that they

cannot ground other forms of truth: in this sense metaphor can, depending upon the

nature of the area of concern, be as much a source of truth as putatively literal scientific

assertions. The Romantic questions that affect this whole discussion, to which I can now

turn, concern the relationship of world-disclosure to self-consciousness, which is where

we can gain a different perspective on McDowell's concerns.

22 , , . .

,

, : 1989

.


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22

'CAN I LOOK FOR A SCHEMA FOR MYSELF, IF I AM THAT WHICH

SCHEMATISES?'

The core of the relationship of world-disclosure to self-consciousness is contained in

Novalis' characteristically acute question in the 'Fichte Studies': 'Can I look for a schemafor myself, if I am that which schematises?' (Novalis PTW p. 162). What sort of account

of self-consciousness is implied by the issue of schematism? As we saw, McDowell treats

the question of self-consciousness in a Hegelian manner, regarding it as emerging along

with objectivity via initiation into the space of reasons, which -- hence his references to

Gadamer and Wittgenstein -- includes learning the language of a community: 'Initiation

into a language is initiation into a going conception of the space of reasons (MW p. 184).

This notion of self-consciousness also has echoes in Heidegger, who claims, in a passage

which later cites Hegel's account of 'reflection' -- and which exemplifies exactly the

problem Novalis will reveal -- that:

The manner in which the self is revealed to itself in the facticity of Dasein can

... accurately be called reflection, but one must not understand thereby what

one commonly understands by this expression: a self-observing which is bent

back onto the I, but rather a structure of the kind which is announced by the

optical significance of the expression 'reflection'. Reflecting here means:

refracting itself on something, shining back from there, i.e. showing itself in

the reflection back from something (Martin Heidegger, Die Grundproblemeder Phnomenologie, Frankfurt: Klostermann 1989 p. 226).

As such, the self is that which 'shines back from things' (ibid. p. 229).23 This involves

much the same argument as in McDowell, as their concern with what Heidegger terms

'being in the world' and the common link to Hegelian reflection suggests. Novalis'

question, though, points to an important problem. The initial basis of his question is the

status of the 'intellectual intuition' we encountered in Fichte, which is explored in

Novalis' 'Fichte Studies'.

24

23 ,

. , : , : 1992 . 2246.

24 ,

, , , ,

: 1991, , . .


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23

The recognition of oneself in the model quoted from Heidegger is a form of 'self-

reflection in the other', that is also encountered in McDowell and Hegel. In this model

recognition of a world-object occurs when the subject's receptivity encounters the

resistance of something in the world which can, via schematism, be seen as something

and thus can become part of the space of reasons by being linked to concepts of otherthings in judgements. This encounter also reveals the subject to itself as subject via its

reflexive difference from the world, thus via the 'world's making an appearance' to it.

Novalis' concern is with the status of the subject which is engaged in this process. How

does the space of reasons account for itself? How is it that my experiences can be known

as my experiences, given that there can, for reasons now to be investigated, be nothing in

the object world that can tell me this?

In the reflection model employed by Heidegger and Hegel, as Dieter Henrich,

Manfred Frank, and others have shown, one is left with an insoluble problem, which

Fichte initially revealed and which Novalis, Schelling and Schleiermacher develop in a

variety of directions.25 The source of the problem is present in Kant's transcendental

deduction, which is intended to show, in Schlegel's words cited above, that 'there MUST

BE experience'. The transcendental deduction can, somewhat crudely, be regarded as the

attempt of that which schematises to find a schema for itself: what is to be established in

the deduction cannot be described by a rule which would identify it, because it would

itself have to be the source of such rules for itself -- hence Schelling's idea of the schema

as the 'intuition of a rule'. Fichte's insight with regard to Kant's 'I think that must be able

to accompany all my experiences' (KrV B p. 132), which is the 'highest point to whichone must attach all use of the understanding' (ibid. p. 134), was that we can only

understand the nature of self-consciousness by realising that -- as opposed to knowledge

of states of affairs, in which we can synthesise concept and intuition by seeing the

schematised object determinately as 'x' -- the self's relationship to itself cannot depend on

such a synthesis. This is because it must already be immediately familiar with itself for

reflexive self-identification to be possible at all: otherwise a regress results, in which my

subjective consciousness of myself as object of reflection requires a further

consciousness to establish that it is my consciousness, and so on.As Manfred Frank has repeatedly argued (e.g. in Frank, Selbstbewutsein und

: ,

, .

25 , : , :

1990, 19932.


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24

Selbsterkenntnis op. cit.), if I look in a mirror in order to see myself I will only recognise

myself, as opposed to a random object or person, if I am already aware that it is myself

that I am to look at before the reflection. The external image in the object world cannot

itself provide the criterion which allows me to identify the reflected object as myself, as

the subject that is looking at the image. Sidney Shoemaker sums this up in the dictumthat: 'Perceptual self-knowledge presupposes non-perceptual self-knowledge, so not all

self-knowledge can be perceptual' (Sidney Shoemaker, in Shoemaker and Swinburne,

Personal Identity, Oxford: Blackwell 1984 p. 105). The self-ascription of experience thus

depends upon an immediate aspect of 'mind' which cannot be said to emerge along with

the awareness of objectivity via insertion into the space of reasons, because it must

always already be in place for the insertion to be possible at all.

Fichte problematically termed this immediacy, as we saw, 'intellectual intuition',

and made it the ground of philosophy, as the unconditioned self-certainty which renders

the sequence of conditioned conditions intelligible. Now Hegel's primary objection in the

Phenomenology to the notion of 'intellectual intuition' is that it requires the beginning of

philosophy to lay claim to something which Hegel thinks can only be a result. This,

though, is a classic example of the reflection model:

only this identity (Gleichheit) which reestablishes itself or the reflection in the

being-other in itself -- not an original unity as such or an immediate unity as

such -- is the true .... The true is the whole. But the whole is only the essence

which completes itself by its development. One can say of the Absolute that itis essentially a result, that it is only at the end what it is in truth (G.W.F.

Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1970 p. 23--4).

It is, for Hegel, only at the end that the content of the overcoming of the difference of

intellect -- spontaneity -- and intuition -- receptivity -- can be made intelligible in

'absolute knowledge'. In McDowell's terms knowledge can only 'bear on the world' (MW

p. 184) if the division of intellect and intuition is revealed in the process of their

interaction as only relative. In the way that I become there 'for myself' when I movebeyond 'immediacy' and see myself in a mirror, it is, for Hegel, only when the Absolute

has become 'for itself' in the process of reflection that it is truly realised as itself: 'If the

embryo is in fact in itself a person, that does not mean that it is it for itself' (Hegel,

Phnomenologie des Geistes, op. cit. p. 25). It is not clear how much of this McDowell

wants to take on board, but some aspect of Hegel's model is required for any defense of

Absolute Idealism.


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However much Hegel's structure may be apt as an account of reflexive aspects of

the developmental psychological constitution of self-knowledge and knowledge of the

world, the central epistemological contention of Hegel's argument cannot be defended.

The fact is -- as the Romantic position insists well before Hegel even formulates his

position in its mature form -- that without a prior pre-reflexive criterion which allows thatwhich is in itself to re-cognise itself later as that which is now for itself, there would be

nothing at the end of the process that could reveal to it that it is the same as what began

the process. The core issue between the Romantic and Hegelian positions is, then,

whether the Absolute really can, as Hegel thinks, be grasped by the process of reflection,

and whether it therefore requires no presupposition external to reflection. In McDowell's

terms: can the conceptual really be 'unbounded' if, as the Romantic model suggests, at

least one of its undeniable conditions of possibility cannot itself be articulated in a

concept? Bell's talk of 'a spontaneous, blind subjective awareness of intrinsic but

inarticulable meaning' can begin to suggest what is meant here: this awareness cannot be

dissolved into the ways in which one may subsequently conceptualise it, because that

would change its necessarily immediate character into something mediated. The character

of this awareness is best understood, as Bell suggests, via aesthetic experience. Frank

refers to the fact that 'the light in which consciousness is situated does not flow from

itself, but from a (non-causally conceived) ground which consciousness can never fully

illuminate' (Manfred Frank, ed. Selbstbewutseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre,

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1991 p. 466). The fact that this ground is not thought of causally,

because it must also be what gives rise to our spontaneity, is what distinguishes theRomantic idea from Davidson's and Rorty's assumption that receptivity is merely causal,

and thus from their separation of the space of reasons from receptivity. Like McDowell

the Romantics do not accept the separation in this form, but neither would they accept his

reflexive alternative.

Novalis uses the implications of the issue of reflection to question Fichte's attempt

-- via the understanding of the space of reasons as part of the absolute I's self-reflection in

the form of a relative I and not-I -- to ground an Idealist conception of mind and world.26

26

( , ,

). ,

, , ,

.


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26

Fichte is best understood in this respect as arguing that the ground of philosophy is an

absolute spontaneity which has to contradict itself if it is to be manifest: hence its

division into relative I and not-I and the need for spontaneity to be, as it must be for

McDowell, part of receptivity if there is to be an intelligible world at all. Novalis only

accepts certain aspects of this account. If philosophy begins with knowledge of the objectworld, he maintains, it will just disappear into the natural sciences, which deal with

things that can be 'learned' by experience: this is, as we have seen, one way in which

Spinozism was understood at the time.27 Much the same idea is precisely what is

proposed these days by the 'bald naturalism' of much contemporary cognitive science,

which, as we saw, is one of McDowell's main targets. If philosophy is concerned instead

with the ground of knowledge this cannot, as Jacobi's arguments already suggested, itself

be knowledge that can be learned, because that would give no account of how knowledge

is intelligible in the first place:

What is learned must be different from the learner. What is learned is an

object -- so the learner is not an object .... Philosophy is itself in the learner.

Now there it will be self-contemplation [i.e. reflection]. Oh dear! how does

the learner begin to listen to itself in this operation [?]. He would, then, have

to learn himself -- for by learning we understand nothing but intuition of the

object and imprinting it into ourselves with its characteristics. This would be

an object again. No, it cannot be self-contemplation, for that would not be

what is required. Perhaps it is a feeling of self. What is a feeling? (NovalisPTW p. 17--18).

However much we may learn about ourselves and the world by insertion into the space of

reasons, this does not account for the aspect of self-consciousness which cannot come

about via reflexive self-knowledge and which is the prior condition of 'objective'

synthesised knowledge and self-knowledge. My memory of childhood experiences as my

experiences depends upon an existential continuity of immediate, pre-reflexive self-

consciousness, which both Novalis and Schleiermacher term 'feeling', that can never befully present to reflective consciousness. The real problem, then, Novalis maintains, is

27

.

,

.


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27

that 'feeling cannot feel itself', it 'can only be looked at in reflection. The spirit of feeling

is thereby lost. One infers the producer from the product via the schema of reflection'

(ibid. p. 18). Much of this is already implicit in aspects of Fichte, but the question now is

how Novalis' 'feeling' and 'reflection' relate to each other.

The 'product' is determinate knowledge of the world, the 'producer' is the subject,but we cannot adequately account for subjectivity by inferring from determinate

knowledge back to its producer, because this inverts the real relationship by trying to

make the subject into the object of knowledge at the same time as having to presuppose it

as a ground of knowledge. The categories of the space of reasons that emerge in the

transcendental deduction -- in reflection -- depend upon something which reflection itself

cannot ground.28 In McDowell's conception, spontaneity must be the source of the

organising concepts of knowledge; he thinks, like Kant, that spontaneity becomes

accessible via the subject's interaction with the world, thus also via the constraints

imposed by receptivity. Novalis' point is that spontaneity itself cannot be adequately

articulated in such terms: it can only be 'felt', because it is, unlike what is given in

empirical intuition, not something knowable. This may sound merely mystical, but the

move is completely logical, given the way the key terms here must be understood.

The knowable is, in the Kantian terms which both McDowell and Novalis

employ, something determinate available in receptivity which could be identified via a

concept. What really makes knowledge possible cannot be known in the same way:29

What reflection finds, seems already to be there -- Attribute of a free act --It finds the categories, which seem already to be there -- i.e. whose possibility

(form) and to that extent necessity (form) is in the I and through the I (ibid. p.

28

,

.

29 , . :

.

[

, (...)]

? (, . .

1991. . 407).


28/37

28

17).

In consequence Novalis maintains that 'I is basically nothing -- Everything has to be

given to it -- But it is to it alone that something can be given and the given only becomes

something via the I' (ibid. p. 185). If Absolute Idealism is to be justified, though, it canonly be via a reflexive conception of mind and world, in which the subject can in

principle make itself fully transparent to itself via its relations to the world -- hence the

unboundedness of the conceptual. It is precisely this transparency which Novalis

questions. The realisation with which Novalis is concerned, as Frank points out, is a

docta ignorantia, the 'knowledge' of not-knowing, which comes about in the attempt of

reflection to complete itself, in the attempt of mind to mirror itself in what it comes to

know of the world.

Novalis' admittedly complex conception becomes perhaps rather more accessible

if one ponders the implications of the fact that the subject must involve both spontaneity

and receptivity, as well as the link of spontaneity and receptivity in schematism.

Subjectivity must therefore always contain the possibility of moving from one to the

other. Such transitions must take place within the structure of self-consciousness, which

means that the apparently opposed aspects must in one way be identical as aspects of the

same I: 'action [= spontaneity] and affection [= receptivity], reaction and passion are One

action ... action can become affection, affection action, reaction passion, passion reaction'

(ibid. p. 125). If spontaneity and receptivity are relative negations of each other, they are,

then, in one sense 'identical', because the one cannot be without the other and they mustbe part of the same I for them to be related in any way at all. 30 In his attempt to deal with

such 'negative' relations Hegel will come to regard all finite determinations, which

include anything that can only be determinate via what it is opposed to, as having an

internal contradiction. This means that each determination will eventually be revealed as

merely 'negative', via its need to relate to what it is not. If they are merely negations of

each other, though, as Hegel's model suggests is the case for all determinations of subject

and object before their Aufhebung in absolute knowledge, the being of that within which

the two relate must actually remain outside reflection. Novalis, unlike Hegel, refuses,then, to think this ground, being, can be dissolved into reflection, even though he accepts

that there must be a ground of reflection. As he says of feeling and reflection: 'They are

30 , .

, (

, . . . 374).


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nothing, both nothing without the drive to be I, which unites both in itself, which is both

and yet neither of the two. Now they are both something for each other. They have an

absolute ground of relation' (ibid. p. 30).31

The question is how the I gains access to this ground, which Hegel thinks can be

reached at the notional end of reflection. Novalis maintains of feeling and reflection: 'If itfeels, it is object, pure I -- if it thinks, it is subject, divided I. The unity which

accompanies it everywhere, so that it is completely there where it is -- this is the highest

most essential character of its subjectivity' (ibid. p. 41). The 'highest most essential

character' is, though, not immediately available to it: the unity in question would be that

of which spontaneity and receptivity are the predicates: as such, Fichte's intellectual

intuition is actually secondary to this unity, even though intellectual intuition appears to

be its condition of possibility. This realisation gives rise to the structure of what Novalis

terms 'ordo inversus': 'As soon as the Absolute, as I shall term the originally Ideal-real or

real-ideal, appears as accident or half appears, it must appear inverted' (ibid. p.19) in the

way in which anything which appears in a mirror is inverted. In consequence, if one

wishes to overcome the difference of feeling and reflection: 'one wants to represent non-

reflection by reflection and therefore one never arrives at non-reflection' (ibid. p. 27).

One can, though, as Novalis shows, point to non-reflection by correcting the

inversion of the reflected image. However, this is still only a correction in thought, not

direct access to the unity that is being sought: although I can use a further mirror to

correct the image I see of myself in the first mirror, this still only gives me an image of

myself. Novalis asks in this context:

What sort of a relationship is knowledge? It is a being outside being which is

yet in being .... Consciousness is a being outside being in being. But what is

that? What is outside being cannot be real being. An unreal being outside

being is an image -- So that which is outside being must be an image of being

31 :

Everything which is opposed to something is the same as what it is opposed to in one

characteristic = X; and: everything the same is opposed to what it is the same as in one

respect = X. Such a characteristic = X is the ground, in the first case the ground of relation in

the second the ground of difference; for identifying (gleichsetzen) or comparing (vergleichen)

what is opposed is called relating; opposing what has been identified is differentiating them

(Fichte WerkeI, op. cit. p. 111).


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in being .... Theory of representation or of not-being in being, in order to let

being be there for itself in a certain manner (ibid. p. 10).

Because being is only 'there for itself in a certain manner' in knowledge it is clearly not

there in an absolute manner. Novalis therefore rejects the idea that the reflexive --cognitive -- ground, as opposed to the immediate -- real -- ground, of knowledge can

offer an exhaustive account of the relationship of mind and world. The structure of

reflection does not give the necessary grounding unity required for the relationships in

question to be intelligible, for me to know how it is that my thoughts are my thoughts, to

feel that I understand the 'discourse of the other' which I also employ in rendering my

world intelligible. Novalis' subject 'is at one moment object, then subject .... Reflection

and object are accidents -- I is the One which constitutes them -- and as reflection only

consists in opposing, it continually opposes' (ibid. p. 208). As such, in one of his most

illuminating formulations

Reflection is not the whole of thought, but rather thought which has been

acted upon. I means the absolute which is known negatively -- what remains

after all abstraction -- What can only be known by action and which realises

itself by eternal lack (ibid. p. 181).

We may seem by now to have moved rather a long way from the concerns of McDowell,

but I want now to conclude by trying to indicate in a fairly general way why this is notnecessarily the case.

CONCLUSION

The question which connects McDowell to the Romantic position I have illustrated by

Novalis' 'Fichte Studies' is whether the notion of the 'unboundedness of the conceptual' is

tenable in view of the structures we have just considered. Novalis maintains against the

reflexive conception that, even though consciousness necessarily seems to move fromlimitation to the unlimited via the progressive revelation of the interrelations between

aspects of determinate knowledge given in intuition, what is actually happening is that

the prior Absolute, the non-causal ground -- 'being' (ibid. p. 11) -- makes itself limited in

consciousness. This means that consciousness itself is preceded by something to which it

only has indirect access, via its inability to ground itself, an inability which is apparent in

its being suspended between a merely remembered past and an as yet unknowable future,


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in what Novalis termed its 'eternal lack'. The simple fact from a Romantic perspective is

that without a final answer to the question of what the space of reasons actually is

philosophy cannot claim that the conceptual is unbounded, or, in other words, that being

is merely part of a structure of reflection.32

For Novalis mind and world emerge as predicates of a ground which is bothdifferent from and identical with those predicates: this ground is not, as we saw,

dogmatically presupposed but rather revealed to us in the breakdown of reflection.

Schelling develops an almost identical position to this in the 1820's, which he will later

use against Hegel:

The transition out of the subject [= the Absolute, which Schelling terms 'the

absolute subject'] into the object reflects itself via the transition out of the

object into the subject. As the object reflects itself in the water, in the same

way the absolute subject stands in an inverted relationship to consciousness.

The absolute subject only leaves behind absolute non-knowledge. But if A

[the absolute subject] becomes B [the object world, including ourselves], in

the same relationship B becomes A, i.e. knowledge (F.W.J. Schelling, Initia

Philosophiae Universae (1820-1), ed. Horst Fuhrmans, Bonn: Bouvier 1969 p.

44).

The goal of knowledge here becomes an endless attempt to complete the inherent lack

that is the result of the limitations of reflection: 'Now in man ... wisdom [which wouldreally be 'absolute knowledge'] is not present anymore, in man there is no objective

bringing forth, but rather just ideal imitation (ideales Nachbilden) .... in him there is only

knowledge' (Schelling, Initia Philosophiae Universae, op. cit. p. 27). What the subject can

know is that which can be predicated of being in judgements -- not being itself, which

always transcends its appearances and can 'appear' to consciousness only as the inherent

'lack of being' revealed in the limitations of reflection. Is this, though, a version of what

McDowell termed a 'coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality'? The

answer to this depends upon whether 'reality' and being, in the sense just suggested, aresimply equivalent. In Romantic terms seeing them as equivalent is in fact a mistake,

32

, ,

() .


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precisely because being is the ground of the relationship between thought and reality that

is revealed by the failure of reflection, rather than one of its two related aspects.

There is little doubt that Novalis, like both Schelling and Schlegel, does assume a

coherence theory of truth, in which particular truths are constituted via the relationships

within a totality: given that the totality could not in Romantic terms ever be said to becomplete, truth is open to constant revision and will consist in fallibilistic consensus. The

alternative to this would either be the regress of grounding shown by Jacobi or a false

claim to immediacy of the kind present in bald naturalism. The debate between

McDowell and the Romantics essentially concerns the nature of the constitution of what

is known via schematism. The Romantics, as we saw, also suspect the separation of

spontaneity and receptivity, and the idea that access to the object world is merely causal,

but they do not think what this implies allows the claim that the conceptual is unbounded,

because that which schematises can neither schematise itself nor ground itself via its

reflection in the other. Hegel is also at first sight a coherence theorist, but the completion

of his system of reflection turns coherence into correspondence: if the end really is the

truth of what seemed immediate at the beginning the two must in fact correspond. If

Hegel's form of correspondence is, as the Romantic arguments suggest, unrealisable,

truth becomes instead a regulative idea which we understand via our feeling of the lack of

being inherent in all reflection, thus by the impossibility of correspondence and the need

for the ever renewed praxis of interpretation in new contexts. Novalis maintains:

All the superstition and error of all times and peoples and individuals restsupon the confusion of the symbol with what is symbolised -- upon making

them identical -- upon the belief in true complete representation -- and

relation of the picture and the original -- of appearance and substance -- on

the inference from external similarity to complete inner correspondence and

connection -- in short on the confusions of subject and object (Novalis PTW

p. 637).

This is what leads to the Romantic idea that art's 'intrinsic but inarticulable meaning' may,as Bell claims, give us crucial insights into the ground of world-disclosure, of a kind

which determinate objective knowledge located in chains of conditions never can. Hegel,

on the other hand, thinks, of course, that the truth of art can be cashed out into what

philosophy can say about it. It is a similar lack of attention to the implications of

aesthetics for questions of epistemology which weakens certain aspects of McDowell's

arguments.


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Now it is not clear just how much of what is in question between the Romantic

and Hegelian positions can be straightforwardly applied to McDowell's conception. In

MW McDowell never gives an explicit account of his relationship to the moves which

Hegel makes in order to argue for the unboundedness of the conceptual, in which 'mind'

and 'world' are just relative negations of each other that can be 'aufgehoben' in a positiveconclusion, though he does claim to embrace Absolute Idealism. What is clear is that

McDowell sees his arguments as offering ways of 'immunizing' ourselves 'against the

familiar philosophical anxieties' (MW p. 180) about whether thought really bears upon

the world. It seems evident that by this he means the kind of anxiety which is generated

either by a Cartesian substance dualism, or the Kant of noumenal causality, or coherentist

views like those of Davidson and Rorty which separate receptivity from the realm of

justification.

In Romantic terms, though, thought does inherently bear upon the world, even if

this is not finally describable within a structure of reflection or a theory of

correspondence: 'One has always regarded it as the greatest difficulty to get from

consciousness to reality (Daseyn). But in our view this difficulty does not exist.

Consciousness

john mcdowell's mind and world, and early romantic epistemology revue internationale de philosophie

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