J.N. Findlay

History of Philosophy

On Meinong's Theory of Objects

"In the beginning of the century the great realist philosopher, Alexius Meinong, taught a doctrine of Aussersein, of an infinite realm of objects quite indifferent to the distinctions between being and non-being, between reality and unreality, between what is and what is not the case. In the democracy of that world the golden mountain stood on a level with Pennines, the round square on a level with the Red Square at Moscow, the equality of 2 and 2 to 10 to the equality of 2 and 2 to 4. Betrand Russell, at first charmed by this doctrine, devoted vast energy to its demolition, constructing the famous Theory of Descriptions on which most of modern British philosophy is founded. I am far from denying that Russell was right in refusing to admit the boundless wealth of Aussersein into the world beyond the cave of even into that purified portion of the cave where right reason fully prevails. But people have thereby been led to forget that the unreal, the abstract, the illogical, the imaginary, the hypothetical and the ideal are an essential foil in human experience to the real, the concrete, the logical and the scientifically acceptable" (The Discipline of the Cave, p. 31).

On Hegel

“I have used Hegelian methods in a most un-Hegelian cause: to establish just that sort of ultimate other-worldliness which Hegel is so often at pains to dissolve”.  The Discipline of the Cave, p. 16.

“Hegel, as careful students will know, only made use of his dialectic to establish a vastly enriched humanism and this-worldism, in which das Jenseitige, that which seems to lie beyond the cave, is brought wholly within the compass of human experience, so that human rationality when raised to the fully self-conscious forms of art, religion and philosophy, simply becomes the all-explanatory raison d’etre of everything. Other philosophers, both earlier and later, have, however used something like Hegel’s dialectic to go beyond the confines of the human cave. Plato and Plotinus have used alleged discrepancies in ordinary modes of conceiving things to draw us up towards higher realms of being, Spinoza made use of an ‘intuitive science’ to take us beyond the mutilated perspectives of ordinary experience, and Bradley, clad in a loosely woven robe of Hegelian and Spinozistic fibres, rose by dialectic to a strange type of purely sentient experience which he said was that of the Absolute.” The Discipline of the Cave, pp. 80-81.

On Hegel's Dialectical Method

"Understanding is the beginning of philosophy: only when various mutually complementary, often antithetical abstractions have been clearly developed, will it be possible to integrate them into a richly analyzed , living view" (Hegel: A Re-examination, NY: Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 61).

"According to Hegel, the subject of a philosophical proposition only acquires a  definite content as we go on to predicate notions of it in thought, in which process we may find ourselves wanting to distort the normal use of our predicates, and to say, for example, that the Soul is both finite and infinite, or again that it is neither" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p, 62).

"It is...in the Kantian antinomies that Hegel sees the most explicit modern expression of Dialectic. Kant is praised, not only for showing that our notions of time, space, and causal dependence can be developed in contradictory ways, but in showing further that such contradictions are 'essential and necessary', that they do not spring from a casual error or conceptual mistake as previous philosophers had supposed...[Hegel] criticizes Kant for confining the antinomies to a limited set of cosmological ideas: he should, on Hegel's view, have recognized their presence in objects of all types, and in all notions and ideas" (Hegel: A Re-examination, pp. 64-5, referencing Hegel's Lesser Logic, par. 48.)

"Everything in the world is said by Hegel to involve opposed and contradictory aspects: he maintains in fact that contradiction is the motive force of the world, that it is absurd to say that contradictions are unthinkable" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 65, referencing Hegel's Lesser Logic, par 119, Zus. 2).

"The characteristic of Reason or Speculation, as opposed to Dialectic, is that it succeeds in uniting or reconciling opposed characteristics, so that the unalloyed contradiction marking the dialectical stage, which is responsible for its unease, passes over into a state which is also one of harmony and peace...and if Dialectic has shown that concepts so opposed either break down into senselessness or simply pass over into one another--then the function of Reason is to integrate such notions into new unities, where they will be shown to require each other and to be necessary conditions of each other" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 66).

"Hegel does not think that the harmonies of Reason involve any mere rejection of the disharmonies and contradictions of dialectical thought. These disharmonies may be 'overcome' but their overcoming is also their perpetual preservation. For they are overcome only in the sense that they are seen to be necessary conditions of a reasonable result, and so, in a sense, not overcome at all. One may, in fcat, say with some exaggeration, that for Hegel the overcoming of contradictions and irrationality consists really in their permanent acceptance, since they are seen to be essential to, and therefore part of, the final rational outcome. As Hegel himself puts it: 'A speculative content cannot express itself in any one-side proposition. If we say, e.g., that the Absolute is the unity of the subjective and the objective, this is indeed the case, but is to this extent one-sided, in that here only the unity is pronounced and stressed, while in actual fact the subjective and the objective are not only identical, but also different.'"(Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 64)...

"Hegel is...deeply opposed to any view which makes the contradictions of Dialectic merely apparent, something that will vanish once Systematic Science has been achieved (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 64)...Hegel further emphasizes that he is not talking about 'contradiction' in some half-hearted or equivocal manner: he is not saying that X is A in one sense, but not A in another, that it is A from one point of view but not from another...Hegel makes it as plain as possible, that it is not some watered-down, equivocal brand of contradiction, but straightforward, head-on contradiction, that he believes to exist in thought and the world, and to be an ineliminable component in self-conscious spiritual reality" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 77).

"We may, however, maintain that, whatever Hegel may say in regard to the presence of contradictions in thought and reality, the sense in which he admits such contradictions is determined by his use of the concept, and not by what he says about it. And since he uses 'contradiction' to illuminate the workings of ordinary notions, and things in the world, and not to cast doubt on their meaning or reality, it is plain that he cannot be using it in the self-cancelling manner that might at first seem plausible. By the presence of 'contradictions' in thought or reality, Hegel plainly means the presence of opposed, antithetical tendencies, tendencies which work in contrary directions, which each aim at dominating the whole field and worsting their opponents, but which each also require these opponents in order to be what they are, and to have something to struggle with" (Hegel: A Re-examination. p. 77).

"Whatever one may think of the detailed application of his Dialectic, (Hegel) has certainly made plain that our notions do carry with them a certain natural shading in other notions, a natural implication of such notions, and a natural favourableness and unfavourableness to other notions, which is not in our power to create or alter, but which may be said to rest solely on their affinity of content" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 79).

"Hegel in fact admits that much of the detail of the world is contingent and dialectically indeducible: he should have gone further , in conformity with his actual practice, and admitted that even its broader features admit of no precise deduction, but merely if an illuminating treatment. We can show, that is, how things and notions can be regarded as making contributions to the self-consciousness of Spirit: we cannot show that the same contributions could not have been made otherwise" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82). 

"We may note...that the notion of Spirit, in which the Dialectic culminates, is such as to forbid that the Dialectic should be anything like a deductive system, in which unique conclusions follow rigorously upon definite premises. For Spirit can only exist as Spirit in so far as it is confronted with an other which it cannot render completely transparent" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82).

"It seems better to judge Hegel's remarkable performance in the light of the reasonable aims which appear in his practice, than in the light of the unreasonable aims which may be read into his less careful statements by his admirers or his detractors" (Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 82).

On the Kantian Subject

“It is also important to stress here that, for Kant, our own thinking selves, as the agents who perform all our perceptual and conceptual syntheses, and who present us with our picture of a coherent, real world, and of whose regular action we are at all times capable of being conscious, are themselves objects of which no intuitive, sensuous presentation is possible, and which are accordingly, in their non-apparent aspects, wholly beyond knowledge (CPR, B. 157-8).”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 2.

“And this unknowable, thinking subject must further be credited, in virtue of certain moral demands...with the power to initiate changes in itself and the world, to which no adequately determining, previously existent causal factor can be assigned.  Such a power is not only not illustrated by anything given to sensible intuition: it is also, in Kant’s view, incapable of being thus illustrated.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 3.

“Kant’s account of experience and knowledge therefore presupposes the existence of agents and acts that cannot be empirically known, since they are the preconditions of empirical knowledge, and it also presumes that we can form just notions of such agents and of them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 5.

On Kant's Attitude Towards Metaphysics

“Kant, like Wittgenstein, admits that the notions of transcendent metaphysics have deep roots in our conceptual and linguistic apparatus, but he does not, like Wittgenstein, think that there is some sort of philosophical therapy which could exorcise them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object,p. 200.

“There is a great deal of brash writing in the Critique of Pure Reason, and an exaggerated repudiation of the magnificent metaphysical tradition in which Kant grew up, and which is really always in the background of his thought.  But this brash writing has been greatly admired by many, particularly in recent times, and has been given a false importance which a careful study of Kant will dispel.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p 28.

“Unapparent objects behind appearances and experience are..part of the Leibnizian tradition, which as modified by Christian Wolff and his school, provided the true background against which all Kant’s teaching must be understood.  To Leibniz, as to Kant, space was only a well-founded phenomenon, the expression of parallelisms and affinities among monadic substances, some apperceptive and rational, some irrationally conscious, and some dizzily confused, which make up the true world.  To this view Kant always shows deference: it tells us, he says, what Things-in-themselves would have to be like if we could have any knowledge of them.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 17.

“Without some definite idea of the logical character of what could be independently real, we should not be able to characterize our experienced world as being merely phenomenal.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 24.

“Kant does not…forbid us to retain the conception of a persistent personal self-responsible for all we remember to have done and thought, and whatever we anticipate.  The postulation of such a self will, in fact, be shown to be unavoidable from a moral point of view.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 206.

On Kant and "Knowledge" of the Transcendental

“Kant certainly uses the word ‘knowledge’ eccentrically in holding that what we regard as a necessary condition of a certain sort of knowledge is not itself capable of being known; but for Kant we can never be said to know what we only conceive emptily and without fulfilling intuition.  We cannot therefore be said to know that there is a Transcendental Subject or that there are Transcendental Objects, though both are necessary to the existence of empirical knowledge.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 7.

“It is, however, all-important to stress that Kant believes that there absolutely is such a sensitive, perceptive, thinking subject, before which objects display themselves in experience, and that is present and active even when we are much too object-absorbed to be conscious of it, and that there are properties that it has ‘in itself’, with which we are necessarily unacquainted.  It may even, as far as we can tell, be the very same being that appears to us as the brain or the nerves in the body (see, e.g., CPR, B 72.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 10.

“We have, Kant holds, some sort of immediate sense of our own spontaneous causality in acts of free choice, particularly in those of moral decision, but the sort of freedom of which we are then conscious is nothing that we can clearly understand (e.g., CPR, B. xxix), and of which he only once or twice dares say that we can have knowledge.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 11.

“Kant’s whole procedure is, therefore, such as to suggest, and at one or two crucial points to assert, a thoroughgoing correlation between the structures of phenomenal givens and those of their transcendent structures.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 15.

Kant on Freedom of the Will

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Kant...defined freedom purely in negative terms: it is a form of causality in which there is no prior inclination which precisely determines what is done or chosen, or determines whether there is an endorsement of a given inclination, or contrary decision to abide by the moral law.  To use such a notion in explanation demands, however, that we should give it a positive meaning, and this, in the sense of being able to illustrate it intuitively, is something that we cannot do.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.

“Freedom is not an ordinary concept of which plain illustrations can be given: it is rather a Transcendental Idea whose possible cases transcend illustration.”  Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.

“Beings endowed with a will therefore necessarily think of themselves as free, and take themselves to be free, and this is so even if the Idea of freedom has nothing corresponding to it in intuition, and in fact transcends all possible experience…it gives to a transcendent power a definite place in the phenomenal order, even if only in the thought of rational agents.  To be obligatorily thinkable seems, in fact to be the characteristic manner in which the transcendently real insinuates itself into phenomenal experience.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.

“Kant comments on the strange circle, which obliges us to believe in our freedom, that is, our non-pathological self-determination, in order to understand the possibility and the necessity of moral laws; but which also obliges us to accept the possibility and necessity of unconditional moral laws in order to understand the possibility and necessity of such freedom (p. 450).  The two concepts are in fact equivalent: a will free to determine its direction without the pressures of particular interests must necessarily follow laws of the purest generality—it cannot dispense with all laws since it is a rational power—and a will governed by laws of the purest generality must necessarily be able to resist determination by particular interests.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.