witt gen stein, kant and husserl on the dialectical temptations of reason

8/8/2019 Witt Gen Stein, Kant and Husserl on the Dialectical Temptations of Reason

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Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 277307 c Springer 2005

Wittgenstein, Kant and Husserl on the dialectical temptations

of reason

DANIEL J. DWYERPhilosophy Department, Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH, USA

(e-mail: [email protected])

Abstract.

There is an interesting sense in which philosophical reflection in the tran-scendental tradition is thought to be unnatural. Kant claims that metaphysical

speculation is as natural as breathing and that transcendental critique is neces-

sary to prevent reason from lapsing into a natural dialectic of dogmatism and

skepticism. Husserl argues that the critique of theoretical reason is grounded

upon a transcending of the natural attitude in which we are at first unjusti-

fiably and navely directed toward objects as separate from consciousness.

A perfectly sensible question arises: Why do we need to effect a change in

our natural cognitive orientation to both ourselves and the world in order to

know each respectively? Why does a sort of dialectical self-deception come

so naturally to us, and why is an effort so great as to seem unnatural necessary

for philosophical self-knowledge? The aim of this paper is threefold: first,

to argue that seemingly compulsory philosophical assumptions are inevitablygenerated from within reason itself and thus remain resistant to a complete

therapy; second, to show how Kant diagnoses reasons dialectical tendencies

as inevitable and ever-recurring without transcendental vigilance; finally, to

argue that the early Husserls appropriation of a transcendental epistemology

is influenced decisively by Kants transcendental reflection in order to combat

the reigning naturalism of his day. My overall claim is that by thematizing the

natural dialectic of reason best articulated in the first Critique, we can disclose

the Kantian way in which Husserl conceives of the natural temptation to nat-

uralize consciousness. We first turn, however, to an influential contemporary

account of a decidedly non-transcendental philosophy, what has come to be

known as therapeutic Wittgensteinianism.1

1. Wittgenstein on seemingly compulsory temptations

Some contemporary thinkers believe that, following Wittgenstein, purely di-

agnostic and therapeutic philosophy can root out and suppress the dialectical


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278 DANIEL J. DWYER

tendencies of reason. Part of the attraction of the later Wittgensteins thought

is its apparent promise that linguistic analysis can and must completely di-

agnose and then dissolve reasons own natural temptations to theorize and

speculate. But this promise, if feasible, does not do justice to the inevitability

of reasons natural instincts, which, like the roots of weeds in an otherwise

well-tended garden, will resurface and pose problems ever again. Even though

a full cure of the obsessions of reasons speculative instincts,2 the philo-

sophical disease,3 or the peculiarly philosophical mental cramp4 may not

be possible, a kind of transcendental diagnosis must be made and then sus-

tained with vigilance, lest our bewitched understanding fall back into its nave

oblivion of the primordiality of ordinary language and our form of life. I argue

that Wittgensteins non-empirical ideal of perspicuity about language and ourform of life cannot be achieved and indeed seems to be impossible by means

of mere diagnostic therapy.What is striking about Wittgensteins thought experiments in the Philo-

sophical Investigations is how often he gives a provisional answer to the

questions raised in the form of We are tempted to say that . . .,5 We are held

captive by a picture . . .,6 we are dazzled by the possibility, for example,

of an ideal language.7 He claims that he is merely assembling a series of

reminders not to give in to such illusions,8 and that we can achieve com-

plete clarity so that the problems will completely disappear.9 Wittgenstein

argues that philosophers from Socrates and Plato onwards are held captive

by seemingly compulsory pictures of how language and thought work in re-

lation to extra-linguistic reality. In particular, a transcendental method, or a

transcendent perspective on our form of life, one that calls into question the

conditions of possibility of knowledge of the possibility that thought can cor-

respond to the object itself is motivated by a seemingly natural feeling that

by means of such thoughts we have caught reality in our net.10 What we call

a priori knowledge or transcendental insight is, for Wittgenstein, simply the

form of account which we happen to find very convincing. 11 Philosophys

purpose, then, is not to be a constructive, final explanation of such appar-

ently compulsory illusions but rather a descriptive, therapeutic diagnosis of

how our intelligence is alternately fascinated,12 puzzled,13 deluded,14

seduced,15 bewitched, or dazzled by means of idle and often deceptive

uses of language.16

Philosophical therapy is to remind us of something ofwhich for some reason it is difficult to remind ourselves,17 namely, that it is

only when language takes a vacation that philosophical problems appear to be

intractable.18 Therapy is to untie the knots in our thinking. But Wittgenstein

immediately adds to this thought: philosophizing has to be as complicated

as the knots it unties.19 To untie the knots and provide the antidote, we must

be able to compare apparently nonsensical uses of language with clear and


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THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 279

meaningful uses, and this will, as Bouwsma puts it, therapeutically quicken

our sense of the queer.20

Wittgenstein thus proposes diagnoses, multiple therapies, and finally a

cure: The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing

philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that

it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.21

The promise is to be released from the problems that inexorably keep

reappearing for a certain cast of philosophical reflection.22 But not enough

attention has been paid to the fact that it is a slow cure of reasons ills: In

philosophy we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural

course and slow cure is all important.23 If it is neurosis and not complete

delusion that must be cured, then we might speak, as Jonathan Lear does,24

of a therapy that must let the dialectic of surface and depth play itself out

before we can too quickly speak of a complete healing, where our neurotic

thoughts. . . are at peace.25 There is a passage in which we can see the

slowness of a cure applied to a curious kind of dialectic of itching and

scratching:

Philosophy hasnt made any progress? If somebody scratches the spotwhere he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isnt it genuinescratching otherwise, or genuine itching? And cant this reaction to anirritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for theitching is discovered?26

But to focus on the slowness of the cure is not merely to draw attention to

the stubbornness of philosophers. The linguistic therapist must be sensitive

to some basis in truth from which the platonic neurosis may spring, for one

cant take too much care in treating philosophical mistakes. They contain so

much truth.27 Wittgenstein practices here a certain reflection on unreflective

philosophical practices, a reflection that points to the ineradicability of appar-

ently compulsory temptations whose cure, no matter how slow, can never be

definitive.

There are good reasons to believe that Wittgenstein does not comprehen-

sively dissolve a kind of philosophical dialectic that both provokes and makes

ultimately unsatisfiable his well-known desire for a perspicuous represen-tation (ubersichtliche Darstellung) of linguistic phenomena.28 Wittgenstein

sees a perspicuous representation of the grammar of our language as an ar-

rangement of the reminders of familiar rules, a complete survey of every-

thing that may produce unclarity.29 Perspicuity is lacking if we do not have

a birds eye view or synoptic account of how grammar works, in other

words, if we do not know how to articulate the way we look at things and


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280 DANIEL J. DWYER

linguistic connections as we would like to.30 The complete clarity which per-

spicuity would give us implies that philosophical problems should completely

disappear.31 As Glock as shown, Wittgenstein borrows the originally scientific

concept of perspicuity from Frege, Hertz, and Boltzmann, but he gives to it

the slightly different sense of being able to shed light on a diverse multitude

of phenomena without discovering anything new . . . by analyzing what is

already known which clarifies certain links or interconnections between the

phenomena.32

Although it is true that, forexample, psychology andmathematicssearch for

perspicuityand that platonic philosophers search for an intellectual perspicuity

of a certain kind,33 Wittgenstein clearly distinguishes his goal from both that

of a scientistic reductionism and that of a sideways-on transcendent pictureof language use. One of the first uses of the notion is given in the Remarks on

the Foundation of Mathematics, where surveyability ( Ubersehbarkeit) con-

cerning the validity of a logical proof is shown to exclude all grounds for

doubt.34 But these examples are misleading if one understands by them that

perspicuity needs to be discovered or unearthed by a logical, scientific, or em-

pirical investigation, rather than retrieved or recollected through philosophical

therapy.35 Maintaining that perspicuity is to give the form of account we

want to give36 means something above and beyond simply the constant re-

hearsing of imaginary thought experiments and showing the limit of empirical

explanations of meaning. It is closer to a world-view than a scientific theory.37

Perspicuity has apparently only a negative aim: to remove the influence of

disquieting aspects of grammar to allay philosophical puzzlement.38 To re-

move disquieting problems is to adopt a kind of quietism that can only be

sustained by perspicuity:

Once a perfectly clear formulation ultimate clarity has been reached,there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more, for these alwaysarise from the feeling that something has now been asserted, and I do notyet know whether I should admit it or not. . .. Controversy always arisesthrough leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that theimpression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. Ionce wrote, The only correct method of doing philosophy consists in notsaying anything and leaving it to another person to make a claim. That is

the method I now adhere to.39

But to allay puzzlement in this way does not mean to get rid of it altogether.

For one reason, there does not seem to be a limited number of ways of getting

confused.40 For another, fascination with philosophical problems is part of

the human condition.41 So perspicuity should at the very least help us see that

to relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also


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see why you had it;42 in other words, one needs to understand positively the

kind of attitude that provoked the cramp. Moreover, disclosure of perspicuity

plays the positive role of identifying the scaffolding of facts that uphold

our everyday concepts, facts which, if changed, would make our everyday

linguistic practices meaningless.43

One suspects, however, that this desirable goal is not ultimately realizable

because Wittgenstein does not thematize the kind of non-empirical reflection

necessary to disclose a perspicuous representation. The ideal of a compre-

hensive overview implies a kind of reflection that transcends in a way the

language of any particular language game, for it would arguably apply to any

language game whatsoever, including the often cited imaginative examples of

African tribes who ostensibly do not share our form of life, i.e., our form ofmindedness.44 To understand mindedness in general seems to be a goal for

which the later Wittgenstein yearned, yet he did not fully appreciate the kind

of transcendental goal implied therein. Furthermore, there is the question of

how we are to understand the whole of the therapeutic techniques themselves,

for this understanding is not the kind of understanding we seek when we dis-

solve our individual mental cramps. To say that perspicuity is simply a matter

of retrieving or reminding does not answer the thrust of the question. For it

is clear that after going through a certain kind of philosophical reflection in

the Investigations, we should be led to adopt a different attitude toward the

futile explanations of meaning, understanding, etc.45 Later in the paper, I will

argue that transcendental dialectic has as one of its therapeutic goals the

reflective understanding of the transition between attitudes that continue to

bewitch the intelligence. But Wittgenstein, unlike Kant and Husserl, seems

constrained to articulate such insights because there is no transcendent lan-

guage in which to communicate them the most we can say is that he shows

them, but cannot articulate them without apparently violating his deflationary

and non-revisionary style of investigation.46

2. Therapeutic Wittgensteinians: Platonism as dialectical temptation

There is increasing recognition that the best way to interpret a continuity

between the early and late Wittgenstein is to see him in both periods as at-tempting to overcome a natural and inevitable desire to have questions about

absolute meaning and understanding answered. Among the so-called ther-

apeutic Wittgensteinians, there is first a trend to understand this desire as

conceptual platonism. A platonist seeks an absolute, immutable ground or

third-person, independent perspective or external standpoint by which one can

definitively explain what is meaning, what is meant, what is understanding,


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282 DANIEL J. DWYER

and what is understood. Wittgenstein describes such a point of view as the

search for a super-order or super-concepts,47 or the superlative fact.48

In line with his well-known penchant for ascribing error not to the intellect

but to the will, he also describes this point of view as the longing for the

supernatural49 or longing for the transcendent.50

Conceptual platonism is beholden to the picture of an ever-recurring quest

for an impossible sideways-on view of the world and our own thinking51

as McDowell puts it, a craving for external friction in our picture of [lin-

guistic] spontaneity.52 The platonist demand for an unconditioned behind

the conditioned ways of speech and language games ends up, however, in the

illusion that we understand the meanings of words by following fixed rails

laid down in the world.53

Being disabused of this form of questioning usuallyinvolves a recoil into an illusory security that diverts the attention away from

what Cavell describes as the terrifying non-platonistic vision of a form of life

as the place where our spade hits bedrock.54

A secondcharacteristic of therapeutic thinkers is their growing awareness

of the dialectical role that conceptual platonism or nave realism plays in

generating the philosophical bewitchment of our intellect.55 McDowell calls

conceptual platonism as described above rampant platonism and shows it to

be yet another form of the foundationalist myth of the given which is responsi-

ble for the dialectical oscillationtoward a frictionless linguistic coherentism.56

Not to fall prey to foundationalism is not to indulge the sense of spookiness

or uncanniness but rather to exorcize it.57 One way McDowell thinks he

can carry out the exorcism is to think of certain analytic truths as the so-called

hinge propositions Wittgenstein refers to in On Certainty.58 Another is to

take seriously the vestigial transcendental idealism Lear finds in the later

Wittgenstein.59 But in his own version of Wittgensteinian quietism as a res-

olution of this otherwise ceaseless dialectic, he admits that the impulse [to

philosophy] finds peace only occasionally and temporarily.60 It seems as if

McDowell, after diagnosing rampant platonism and holding fast to the ideal

of Wittgensteinian therapy to dissolve a dialectic between foundationalism

and coherentism, nonetheless shows that quietism leaves questions open and

desires unsatisfied, and it is precisely because of this that he later engages

the transcendental tradition of Kant and Hegel inherited and appropriated by

Sellars.61In conclusion, it is difficult to reconcile the following two claims: on the

one hand, the assertion of apparently compulsory platonistic temptations that

make it hard for us to remind ourselves of the limited nature of philosophical

insight and, on the other, the claim of the genuine prospect of full diagnosis,

therapy and cure which would completely deprive these philosophical pictures

of their compulsory force. The nagging methodological question that haunts


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the Investigations is then: What makes apparently compulsory assumptions

about the relation of mind and world appear to be compulsory? In other words,

can apparently natural philosophical conflicts be brought to a state of perpetual

peace, not through a treaty that recognizes the valid competing claims of the

antagonistic parties but through a dissolution of the rights of all parties to

any natural part of the territory? These questions do not find a satisfactory

answer in the writings of the so-called therapeutic Wittgensteinians. They

remain unanswered because the platonistic malady is seen to be dialectically

necessary (and easily overcome) to make sense of the therapy as proposing a

full cure.62 But if it is true that the philosopher handles a question as he would

an illness,63 then it is not clear how Wittgenstein accounts for the original

and ever-recurring form of our philosophical questions, which are saturatedwith nonsense. Surely it cannot be a nonsensical enterprise to ask what it is

about the questions that makes them nonsensical, in other words, what are the

conditions of possibility of emerging from natural nonsense to philosophical

sense?

At least two thinkers have pointed to the possible interpretation of the late

Wittgensteins thought as containing an unthematic commitment to a kind

of reflective philosophy that is, paradoxically, supposed to do away with

philosophy. Jonathan Lear and Kenneth Westphal both point to passages

in the Philosophical Investigations as evidence of a quasi-transcendental

method on the part of Wittgenstein.64 Lears gloss on transcendental method

is non-empirical inquiry into rule-following, even though, as he admits,

Wittgenstein displays no interest in necessary structures.65 Nonetheless,

Wittgenstein pursues a via negativa: We discover that the obvious forms

of empirical explanation could not possibly answer the kind of platonist

questions that are asked in philosophy, and it is precisely this discovery which

amounts to non-empirical insight into our form of life.66 The idea is that the

logical contingency of our allegedly necessary truths makes it difficult to

imagine an alternative because these most basic facts reflect general facts

about our mindedness. Westphal argues that Wittgenstein claims that if

very general facts of nature were different we would not and could not have

the practices we do.67 One also has to make sense of the kind of affinity

between German, English, and other languages that have more or less affinity

with these languages, for surely this affinity is a necessary constituent in ourform of life, our mindedness.68 How could we make sense of such affinity if

it is not the kind of empirical investigation Wittgenstein avoids? The notion is

not nonsensical, not only because Wittgenstein uses it to describe our mind-

edness, but because we can only reflectively inquire into what non-empirical

concepts might mean through a kind of transcendental inquiry. This inquiry

needs both to avoid conceptual platonism and describe why we are at the


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284 DANIEL J. DWYER

same time attracted to and repelled by the need for a sideways-on view of

the world. The final point is the promising suggestion of a way to capture

a kind of transcendental aspect to Wittgensteins drawing the line always at

our form of life.69 Lear proposes we interpret Wittgensteins quietism about

a full articulation of form of life by comparing it to Kants transcendental I.

Kants assertion of the necessary accompaniment of the I think with all our

representations has a Wittgensteinian parallel, namely, that we are so minded

[in our form of life] must accompany all our representations.70 Forgetfulness

of our mindedness is precisely what is non-empirically disclosed in

just about every imaginative scenario proposed by the later Wittgenstein,

and thus these scenarios must be carried out in a sort of non-empirical

reflection.

3. Kant and the natural dialectic of reason

It is evident that Kant addresses many of the same philosophical problems as

Wittgenstein, but we will focus on how he treats the problematic nature of our

temptations towards skepticism and dogmatism. The first Critique attempts to

refute both those who are inclined to understate reasons theoretical compe-

tenceandthosewhotendtooverstate reasons theoretical competence. Among

the former are Locke and Hume. Among the latter are Plato, Wolff, and Leib-

niz, the transcendental realists who intellectualized the appearances71

in postulating knowledge of things in themselves (A 369). The end result

of the dialectic [that] is natural to reason (B xxxi), this wholly natural

antithetic between skepticism and dogmatism, is ultimately to euthanize

reason.72

Kant explains why we can have an apparently definitive non-empirical

insight into reasons inherent dialectic that oscillates between such overstate-

ments and understatements. Instead of just showing how reasons natural

questioning is frustrated at every turn by its unfounded groping and frivolous

wandering about without critique (B xxx), transcendental reflection discloses

with perspicuity or comprehensiveness (A xiii) why such questioning will al-

ways occur without critical vigilance and reasons self-understanding of its

own capacities. Transcendental epistemology recognizes the threats of con-ceptual platonism on the one hand and the dialectical temptations unearthed

by therapeutic Wittgensteinians on the other. It does this, however, with-

out drawing the merely diagnostic conclusion that multiple deconstructive

therapies are our only recourse to the natural temptations to overstate rea-

sons power. Transcendental reflection discloses with insight why dialectic is

so natural and, on the basis of this disclosure, sees diagnostic quietism and


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conceptual platonism as equal threats to the justified use of reason. For ex-

ample, it may appear that the distinction between Hume and Wittgensteins

methods, according to Kant, is the difference between skepticism and

the skeptical method. The skeptical method is described as watching or

even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to

the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the ob-

ject of dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch

in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resis-

tance (A 424/B 451). If our conclusion in the previous section is right, we

must show that Wittgensteins goal of perspicuity is unattainable until there

is recognition of a non-skeptical, non-empirical insight into the ceaseless nat-

ural temptations into which our understanding falls in its bewitchment bylanguage.

But what is gained by calling the inherently dialectical tendencies of reason

natural? Like Aristotle, Kant distinguishes between natural in the sense of

that which properly and reasonably ought to happen and that which usually

happens (A 4/B 8). It is this distinction that is key to the unity of this paper,

insofar as a transcendental diagnosis of dialectical tendencies of the mind

must identify both senses of the natural and show in what way transcendental

reflection discloses the slide between normative and descriptive tendencies

of the mind. That there is a convincing explanation of the descriptive use of

natural is the first step in disclosing why the normatively natural change of

attitude is to be adopted.73

For Kant, dialectic is an intrinsic component of reasons progression toward

self-critique that safeguards against its own natural tendencies to dogmatism

and skepticism. Insofar as the metaphysical tendencies are generated, not by

the world or nature, but within reason, it is within its power to prevent these

inevitable tendencies from reappearing and seeming compulsory again. Rea-

son can render itself content with its incapacity to go beyond the boundaries

of possible experience and capable of resisting the ever recurring temptations

to project its subjective conditions of knowledge as objective features of the

world (A 613/B 641). But the calming insight into speculative reasons own

limits is fragile insofar as this satisfaction seems ever threatened by a return

of the dialectic if critical vigilance is not maintained:

There is a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason, not one in whicha bungler might be entangled through lack of acquaintance, or one thatsome sophist has artfully invented in order to confuse rational people, butone that irremediably (unhintertreiblich) attaches to human reason, so thateven after we have exposed the mirage (Blendwerk) it will not cease to leadour reason on with false hopes, continually propelling it onto momentaryaberrations that always need to be removed.(A 298/B 35455)


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286 DANIEL J. DWYER

[Unavoidable illusions] are sophistries not of human beings but of purereason itself, and even the wisest of all human beings cannot get free ofthem; perhaps after much effort he may guard himself (sich verhuten) fromerror, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion, which ceaselesslyteases and mocks him.(A 339/B 397)

Kant views reason as inevitably drawn to metaphysical speculation, a

propensity as natural as breathing to overstep the boundaries of experience in

its employment of concepts (A 642/B 670). Reason, in its unquenchable de-

sire for a firm footing (A 796/B 824), seeks satisfaction and takes refuge

in transcendental hypotheses that cannot yield insight or explanation into that

which transcends the boundaries of possible experience (A 772/B 800). Theideas postulated by reason are generated by the dialectical nature of the inner

workings of reason within the real medium of dialectical illusion, i.e., the

subjective which offers itself to or even forces itself upon reason as objec-

tive in its premises (A 792/B 820). The discovery that would yield peace to

philosophical reason is, as it was for Wittgenstein, a complete and systematic

clarity, but it is reasons fate and determination never to find that peace in the

speculative sphere (A 797/B 825)74. This is not to say that reason, through a

complete self-critique by which it determines the range of its own powers and

abides within those limits, cannot reach a kind of unity and self-knowledge.

But it is not clear that reason can entirely free itself of the unavoidable ten-

dencies to fulfill its metaphysical eros by hypostatizing its ideas of a soul, a

complete cosmos, and a supreme being. Reason is compelled as it were, not

by God ora priori in the world, but by itself to raise questions which it cannot

answer. To know that such questions are in principle unanswerable is as deep

an insight that speculative reason can arrive at; but it remains an insight into

itself, not into the divine or the world. The critique of reason has thus to deal

only with itself and the problems which arise entirely from itself, and which

are imposed on it by its own nature, not by the nature of things which are

distinct from it (B 2223).

In the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume emphasizes the minds tendency

to spread itself on external objects and attributes the origin of false philos-

ophy to the tendency of the human mind to transfer the determination of the

thought to the external objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexionbetwixt them; that being a quality, which can only belong to the mind that con-

siders them.75 Perhaps no other philosopher emphasized and critiqued this

metaphysical urge, this reifying tendency of the mind, more systematically

than Kant. Kant appropriates for his critical purposes a logical fallacy familiar

to 18th century logicians, namely, subreption (Erschleichung). According to

the standard usage of the day, subreption is a logical fallacy whereby one


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slips a phenomenon under the wrong category; in Kants general use of the

term, something subjective is mistaken for something objective. As early as

the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant extends the meaning of the term to signify

an error in metaphysics:

Since the tricks of the intellect in decking out sensitive concepts as intel-lectual marks may be called a fallacy of subreption, . . . the interchangeof the intellectual and the sensitive will be the metaphysical fallacy ofsubreption (the fallacy of intellectualizing the phenomena, if a barbarismbe permitted).76

In the Critique of Pure Reason, subreption is a fallacy whereby one substi-tutes the subjective [element] of our presentation for the objective, viz., for

the cognition of what is in the object (A 791/B 819). To avoid subreption we

must focus on the subjective sources underlying the possibility of an object

as such (A 149/B 188), and regard the object as merely appearance (A

36/B 53). Whereas the ideas of reason are transcendent to the understanding,

the immanent concepts of the understanding can always be supplied with

an experience that adequately corresponds to them.77 In the paralogisms of

reason, Kant remarks, One can place all illusion in the taking of a subjective

condition of thinking for the cognition of an object (A 396).

The faculty responsible for subreption is neither the understanding nor rea-

son but judgment. Judgment can be understood in two different but related

ways. First, it is the capacity to judge (Vermogen zu urteilen; see A 69/B

94 and A 81/B 106), or what Longuenesse calls generally the capacity for

discursive thought. Secondly, it is the capacity to judge specifically in re-

lation to sensory perception (Urteilskraft, see A 643/B 671).78 The power

of judgment in the first sense is the ability to subsume under rules, i.e.

to distinguish whether something does or does not fall under a given rule

(A 132/B 171). Transcendental philosophy is critique of judgment, in this

sense; it keeps the power of judgment from making slips, . . . as it uses

what few pure concepts of understanding we have (A 135/B 174). Although

Kant famously equates deficiency in judgment with a stupidity for which

there is no remedy (A 34n.), one might nonetheless see the first Critique

as Kants attempt to provide such a remedy, at least for that peculiar formof philosophical stupidity whereby one misuses ones cognitive powers (A

296/B 353). For example, the Schematism chapter insists that any genuine

employment of the categories of the understanding is restricted to the sen-

sible conditions that render possible the application of objects to objects in

general (A 140/B 179). If one abstracts from these sensible conditions, then

the use of the understanding mistakenly uses the unschematized categories


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288 DANIEL J. DWYER

as the principle of knowledge of material things. This attempt is based on

a deception (T auschung; B 306) insofar as the problem concerns mistak-

ing the conditions of thought for the conditions of things.79 What is at fault

here, in summary, is the way in which reason, without itself noticing it, . . .

surreptiously makes assertions (erschleicht) . . . in which it adds something

entirely alien to given concepts a priori, without one knowing how it was

able to do this and without this question even being allowed to come to mind

(A 6/B 10).

Transcendental dialectic discloses the illegitimate, transcendent use of rea-

son beyond the limits of objective validity. Reason finds itself trapped in

transcendental illusions that cannot be avoided at all, whereby it is tempted

to make unjustified and illusory ontological claims (A 297/B 354), for ex-ample in hypostatizing the union of soul and body (A 389), taking space as

an absolutely necessary and self-subsistent object, and taking the concept of

a first necessary being as a real objective being (A 619/B 647). Kant dis-

tinguishes between conceptus ratiocinati, or correctly inferred concepts that

have objective validity, and conceptus ratiocinantes, or reasoning concepts

that have no objective validity (A 311/B 368). With the latter, there is no ob-

jective thing independent of the reasoning mind, but only an ens rationis, an

empty concept without object (A 669/B 697). This empty concept is a mere

invention (A 292), a mere idea (A 681/B 709), or an empty thought-entity

(Gedankending; A 669/B 697).

In the absence of the givenness of the unconditioned whole behind the

series of appearances (A 792/B 820), reason takes it itself as capable to make

true assertions of it. But this self-misunderstanding resembles subreption in

that the illusion engendered by reason itself rests on subjective principles

and passes them off as objective (A 298/B 354). Critique provides a negative

check on this misunderstanding to prevent sensible intuition from being

extended to things in themselves, and this serves to limit the objective validity

of objective knowledge (A 255/B 311). Transcendental dialectic can thus

be broadly conceived as a critique of understanding and reason that aims at

disclosing and thus avoiding the subreptions and illusions that are definitive of

traditional metaphysics (A 63/B 88)80. And precisely because the dialectical

illusion has its origin in reason, reason can become aware of and correct for its

own self-deception, even though it irremediably attaches to human reason,so that even after we have exposed the mirage it will still not cease to lead our

reason on with false hopes (A 298/B 354)81.It is ultimately transcendental reflection that discloses judgments sub-

reptive tendencies and reasons dialectical tendencies. It is distinguished

from logical reflection, which is a mere comparison of the basic concepts

of identity, difference, agreement, and opposition that abstracts from the


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one needs to arrive at comprehensiveness. It is precisely the need for a changed

philosophical attitude that Husserl appropriates from Kant in his attempt to

overcome the natural dialectical tendency of consciousness to misunderstand

itself and the scope of its own thought.

4. Husserl on the inevitable temptation to naturalism

Both Kant and Husserl can be said to lay claim to an inevitability thesis:

There is something natural and inevitable to the way in which reason or con-

sciousness gets the world wrong in thought, precisely by getting itself wrong

as the condition of possibility of knowledge.92

Whereas Kant and Wittgensteinwere combating a nave realism about objects in their concern to critique a

broadly conceived platonistic metaphysics, Husserl discloses a nave realism

about the nature of subjectivity in his concern to critique both metaphysics

andempiricism. Kants diagnosis of the mixing or blending (Vermengung) of

certain wandering and shifting faculties finds its phenomenological counter-

part in the critique of the blending of two existential standpoints or attitudes

(Einstellungen) one can take toward reasons own capacities and its own

boundaries.93 To put it in Kants terms, what is necessary is the distinction of

reasons empirical and transcendental uses and the disclosure of the altered

way of thinking that distinguishes empirical introspection from transcenden-

tal reflection. For Kant, the aim of the transcendental dialectic can seem to

be primarily negative, namely, to show that the hyperphysical employment of

concepts does not constitute knowledge or experience strictly speaking, even

though transcendental hypotheses must be adopted in order to make sense

of what does constitute knowledge in its systematic form (A 6364/B 88).

But we have also emphasized both reasons positive insight into its own di-

alectical nature as the necessary step to its long-deferred self-knowledge and

Kants confidence that reasons lust for knowledge can be satisfied within cer-

tain bounds. In the Prolegomena, the transcendental viewpoint yields insight

into the boundary of pure experience, and the reference to what transcends

experience:

The setting of a boundary to the field of experience by something which isotherwise unknown to reason, is still a cognition which belongs to it even atthis point, and by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor straysbeyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the knowledge of aboundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is containedwithin it. . .. Reason leads us to the objective boundary of experience, tothe reference to something which is not itself an object of experience butmust be the highest ground of all experience.94


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292 DANIEL J. DWYER

If it is true that the absolute totality of experience is not itself experience,

then we can say it is not given as experience is. But this does not imply

that such a totality or its Wittgensteinian analogue of perspicuity is not

given in any way at all. Indeed if there is to be insight into the boundaries of

reason there would be a givenness appropriate to this insight not on the part

of the world, or the divine, but of reason itself. For both Kant and Husserl,

reason in the sense of the highest capacity of human intelligence to strive for

knowledge can always be tempted to view either its own limits or its own

powers as something greater or less than they really are. Critical vigilance

and a sustaining of our keeping in view of our changed way of thinking are

necessary safeguards against such temptations.

The early anti-psychologistic Husserl understands the transcendental ascharacteristic of the mode of argument according to which the primary ques-

tion is not whether but how knowledge in general is possible. One asks

about what renders intelligible the possibility of knowledge of an objec-

tivity (Gegenst andlichkeit) and the sense of an objectivity of knowledge.95

But what motivates this question as the question that gives sense to the phe-

nomenological enterprise in its earliest stages? The transcendental mode of

argument is found by Kant, at least, to be necessary as a result of the insight

into the natural, dialectical, and self-subverting tendencies of reason.96 In

pre-critical philosophy, the subjective conditions of possibility of knowledge

are either dogmatically reified or skeptically problematized, and are never

laid out as what they really are. Kant goes so far as to speak of an intrin-

sic decay of the human understanding which, together with the dialectic

of dogmatism and skepticism, constitute the necessary conditions for rea-

sons self-rectification.97 Our argument is that Husserls appropriation of the

Kantian problematic as rooted within reason itself is evident in the period in

which he works out a sustained critique of naturalistic epistemology based on

the influential experimental psychology of his day.

The early phenomenological movement is known to have had a general

disdain for dialectical forms of reasoning. It treated dialectic as by and large a

foil for the phenomenological method of intuitive givenness.98 Nonetheless,

if we focus on what is essentially transcendental about the justification of the

intuitive method, we can seize upon a kind of dialectic at the entry gate to

phenomenology in its nascent transcendental phase. It is not presented ex-plicitly as a dialectic of a rational faculty, but implicitly in the necessary and

inevitable confrontation of epistemology with naturalism. It was naturalism

in the form of psychologism that constituted for Husserl the decay of the

human understanding from which a genuine descriptive psychology had to

start out, a project laid out in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic of 1900. What

was necessary there was to thematize and attempt to overcome the tendency of


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consciousness to understand itself according to the categories and principles

of the natural sciences and take itself as just another empirically verifiable

object in the world. Naturalism inevitably misses the genuine sense of the

epistemological problematic because the answer it gives about the nature of

consciousness does not even rise to the level of the question raised about

the possibility of knowledge. Now we set up the context of a transcenden-

tal overcoming of naturalism in the first text in which Husserl articulates a

specifically transcendental approach to epistemology, his epistemology lec-

tures from 19061907 and its first systematic formulation in what is now

published as The Idea of Phenomenology from 1907.

Explanatory psychology in late 19th century Germany relied upon an em-

piricist reduction of all mental experiences as atomistic, self-standing, phys-iological bits of data whose succession of one after the other can only be

inductively tabulated. These bits of data are analytically conceived as ele-

mentary phenomena or physiological facts: sensations, affects, and simple

representations.99 This influential naturalistic psychology conceived of the re-

lations between conscious experiences similarly to the way in which natural

science conceived of the relations between material elements. And to conceive

consciousness as the same in kind as matter is, for Husserl, an example of

the fundamental metabasis or illicit conflation of categories of being made in

modern epistemology. The error of psychologism is therefore

the confusion of fields, the mixture of heterogeneous things in a putativefield-entity, especially when this rests on a complete misreading of the ob-jects whose investigation is to be the essential aim of the proposed science.Such an unnoticed metabasis eis allo genos can have the most damagingconsequences: the setting up of invalid aims, the employment of methodswrong in principle, not commensurate with the disciplines true objects.100

The early Husserl critiques the different varieties of this primordial episte-

mological unclarity as psychologism, anthropologism, and biologism. What

he discloses is the extraordinarily strong inclination in modern philosophy

and psychology to mis-take the totality of consciousness for either some-

thing it is not or something it is only in part. Husserls critique of naturalistic

psychology and empiricist philosophy of mind emphasizes a kind of illicit

indeed a kind of reverse subreption of reason in which the transcendental

capacities of consciousness are confused with the natural, causal properties

of transcendent objects:

Absurdity: when one engages in natural reflection upon knowledge andsubordinates it and its achievements to the natural system of thought foundin the sciences, one at first gets involved in theories that, although initially


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294 DANIEL J. DWYER

attractive, invariably end up in contradiction or absurdity. Tendency to-ward blatant skepticism.101

Within the naturalistic view of self-contained physical laws, both norma-

tivity and consciousness become at worst reduced to the physical and at best

conceived as a secondary parallel accomplishment of the physical or, as we

might put it today, a mere epiphenomenon.102 Naturalism is thus the theory ac-

cording to which purely natural-causal explanations of conscious phenomena

are necessary and sufficient explanations. Put this way, it involves the ab-

surdity of naturalizing something [consciousness] whose essence excludes

the kind of being that nature has.103 Just as for Kant, so too for Husserl the

distinction between the the normatively natural (what ought to be the caseindependent of fact) is reduced to the descriptively natural (what happens to

be the case as a matter of fact). Furthermore, naturalistic science assumes the

possibility of objective knowledge insofar as it never self-consciously raises

the transcendental question of the justification of an objective fact as such: 104

[Metabasis] comes about only through a mistaken, but entirely natural,shifting of the problem: between the explanation (Erklarung) of knowl-edge as a natural fact as offered by the natural science of psychology,and the clarification (Aufklarung) of knowledge in terms of the essentialpossibilities of its achievement.105

Thinking naturalistically is an inborn habit by which we live and ac-

cording to which we inevitably adulterate the conscious naturalistically.106

For Husserl, to be able to grasp the dialectical oscillation of reason between

natural and transcendental viewpoints or between psychologism and an-

tipsychologism, as he characterizes the dialectic at one point107 leads to the

achievement of insight into the validity of the altered attitude of transcenden-

tal consciousness as world-disclosive. What provokes the dialectic and makes

its naturalness problematic is precisely that instead of transcendental descrip-

tion one gets from naturalism merely causal explanation and therefore ones

sense of the necessary normativity of logic and knowledge are reduced to

contingent factors of the constitution of our human species.108 Ones sense

that naturalism cannot answer transcendental questions about knowledge is

not, however, a merely historically contingent sense of nostalgia orHeimwehin a world disenchanted by the all-encompassing reach of natural science to

every worldly being. The philosopher of mind confronts within herself at all

times the extraordinarily strong tendency to judge in a transcendent sense

whenever a transcendently directed act of thought occurs and a judgment is

to be based upon such an act.109 This tendency can be compared to Kants

lazy reason in the case where we hastily regard our investigation into nature


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as absolutely complete so that reason can take a rest (A 689/B 717). Just as

Wittgensteins imaginary interlocutors express the kinds of platonistic and

skeptical views to which they are tempted quite spontaneously in a kind of

context-free dialogue, so too Husserls sense of the naturalness with which

we at first study our minds and its achievements has more to it than merely

the fact that our historical era is unduly impressed by the ever increasing suc-

cess of empirical science. In sum, naturalism, insofar as it presupposes that

empirical answers suffice to answer transcendental questions about the condi-

tions of possibility of knowledge, provides a seemingly compulsory starting

and endpoint of thought to which our minds are always tempted to return.

Naturalism is thus the original sin of epistemology, insofar as transcendental

questions admit only of transcendental answers, i.e. answers. . .

without theleast empirical admixture (A 640/B 668).110 For Kant, a full exploration of

the cosmological ideas should deter us from naturalism, which asserts nature

to be sufficient for itself, because we will be led to see the obvious insuf-

ficiency of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its legitimate

enquiry.111 For Kant, the concepts of the understanding are not derived from

natural experience in Humean fashion precisely because our natural experi-

ence is derived from them.112 So too, for Husserl, consciousness must not be

seen as just another part of the world like any other, because it is precisely the

reason why there is a world there for us in the first place. 113

The very strength of the natural inclination to metabasis concerning con-

sciousness motivates the recourse to the phenomenological reduction or the

putting out of play of our belief in the transcendent aspects of the natural

world in which we unreflectively live. First we problematize and withhold

our assent from straightforward object-directed beliefs stemming from what

Husserl innocently calls the natural attitude (in the descriptive sense of natu-

ral). The attitude is natural insofar as it is the point of view from which we are

at first directed toward transcendent objects in the world in a way that is obliv-

ious to the ways in which these objects are given to and for consciousness. It

encapsulates how we normally accept the world as it presents itself to us,114

and this normality does not manifest countersense, which arises only when

one tries to explain away or reduce everything to the natural attitude.115 The

natural attitude is characterized by a mental directedness towards the pregiven

world within a universal unthematic horizon where notions of pregivennessand horizonality do not yet have any sense.116 We are unreflectively aware of

the transcendence of the objects in the world without a having a correlative

understanding of the immanent ways in which the sense of transcendence in

general is grounded and synthesized in consciousness itself. The natural atti-

tude needs to be put out of play because it is saturated with nave, pre-critical

tendencies to believe that there are indeed objects of perception, memory,


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296 DANIEL J. DWYER

and knowledge that exist entirely independently of our experiencing them.117

Transcendental reflection in the Kantian sense has yet to be carried out since

the manifold of experience (our representations) has not yet been related back

to the sense-constituting origins in the understanding and sensibility.

Husserls argument about the origin of naturalistic thinking and its seduc-

tions is unique because of where he locates its genesis, namely, in the navete

of our pre-philosophical attitude. The problem with the natural attitude is

that it already contains within itself the seeds of dogmatism, in the form of

a metaphysical naturalism.118 Naturalism arises from the absolutizing of the

object-directedness of the natural attitude into an all-encompassing scientific

theory. Now this absolutizing of object-directedness is not an illegitimate en-

terprise in itself indeed all natural science depends upon the bracketing ofthe knowing subject and thematizing of the objects themselves, for otherwise

there would be no straightforwardly objective science but we cannot claim

that naturalism is poised to explain the transcendental question of how the

object-directedness of consciousness can be justified. The reduction leads the

givenness of objects back to consciousness but it also reveals the reflective

consciousness as capable of doing so, a revelation that cannot be captured

within the scope of object-directed natural science. For the altered way of

thinking is already in process in this first part of the reduction, but the change

of attitude is not thematized as an object in natural science. Second, we lead

back the sense and the givenness of all phenomena both physical and mental

to the consciousness to whom and for whom those phenomena are given. In

other words, in the reduction the being of the transcendent world reveals itself

as having the irreducible sense of appearing-for-consciousness.119 The prob-

lem is now that the transcendental or phenomenological attitude strikes us as

a completely unnatural direction of thought.120 By unnatural is meant what

we referred to above as normatively natural, a non-nave critical attitude

that presupposes nothing in its inquiry into the transcendental conditions of

knowledge of the natural world. But it is foressential reasons and not merely

by chance or historical contingency that we find ourselves slipping back into

a naturalistic or psychologistic frame of mind.121

No sooner has transcendental reflection glimpsed the non-naturalistic con-

ditions of possibility of its own knowledge that consciousness falls back into

the natural attitude:

Even those who have gotten clear on the problem find it very difficult tohang onto this clarity and, in subsequent thought, easily slip back into thetemptations of the natural modes of thinking and judging as well as thosefalse and misleading formulations of the problem which grow on theirbasis.122


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Consciousness is such that it wanders and strays (schweifen) from the

transcendental viewpoint of seeingthe scope of awareness themind canhavein

the presence of worldly objects. It shifts away from its twofold insight into the

very sense of the question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge and its

own disclosive capacity to uncover the field of givenness of the world. Husserl

claims that this wandering is almost unavoidable for natural reflection:

The task of epistemology, or the critique of theoretical reason, is firstof all a critical one. It must expose and reject the mistakes that naturalreflection upon the relation between knowledge, its sense, and its objectalmost inevitably makes; and it must thereby refute the explicit or implicit

skeptical theories concerning the essence of knowledge by demonstratingtheir absurdity.123

Reason that wanders succumbs to the enticing temptation to collapse the

attitudinal bipolarity into a seemingly more consistent and apparently more

fruitful methodological or theoretical naturalism.124 Reason that wanders is

reason that oscillates in an uncertain fashion between two attitudinal poles,

between the appreciation of the natural-causal properties of the subject and its

world and the appreciation of the subjects disclosive and sense-constituting

capacities. The reduction at work in Husserls early writings is the attempt, on

the one hand, to recognize this quasi-dialectical nature of the selfs thematic

attention, and on the other hand, to make the thematic attention to the selfs

transcendental capacities into a kindof acquired intellectualvirtue of sustained

reflection.125 What motivates and sustains the necessary move to the reduction

in the early Husserl is nothing in the natural world but something internal to

reason itself. For reason confronts itself and its naturalistic tendencies in its

own attempt to become fully self-conscious and fully justified in its claims to

knowledge. Just as it was for Kant, reason cannot know itself fully unless and

until it becomes aware of its own propensity to metaphysics and naturalism,

propensities as natural as breathing itself. Furthermore, the motivation for the

reduction takes on a fundamentally ethical significance for the early Husserl

as he articulates a Socratic life led in devotion to the fullest evidence possible

in its scientific knowledge of the world. The consistency of phenomenological

investigations depends entirely upon the single-mindedness and purity ofthe phenomenological attitude.126 The ability to sustain transcendental reflec-

tion is something that belongs to the realm of our perfect freedom. 127 The

relevant ideal is the striving for a life in absolute self-responsibility.128 The

stress on freedom and will imply an erotic motor of desire that can generate

and apparently sustain the project of suspending the world-belief of the natural

attitude in order to thematize it in the altered transcendental attitude. 129


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298 DANIEL J. DWYER

5. Conclusion

Wittgenstein, Kant, and Husserl all uncover reasons natural and inevitable

temptations to think and make claims in unjustifiable ways. The revelations of

these temptations disclose them to be operative dialectically in tandem with

opposed views of apparently equal and opposite force. The ultimate antidote

to the ceaseless play of natural misunderstandings, to reasons natural wander-

ings, shiftings, and vacillations (A 615/B 643) may seem to be the dissolution

of reasons natural neuroses and to provide it the peace or the calm insight

(A 797/B 825; A 615/B 643) it yearns for. But I have argued that philosophy

must not simply learn to know when to stop: it must first thematize its own

non-empirical ability to work through the dialectical temptations in order toachieve a reflective overview of reasons tendencies. It is only by transcenden-

tal reflection on the conditions of possibility of knowledgethat onecan achieve

Wittgensteins goal of complete surveyability or perspicuity of our minded-

ness in a form of life.130 Kant and Husserl in equally Socratic fashion show

that dialectic is not to be avoided at all costs; reason very much needs such a

conflict (A 747/B 775). Recourse to transcendental reflection is motivated by

the awareness of theinevitable frustration of all empirical or naturalistic claims

to yield a comprehensive overview of philosophical problems. It is also mo-

tivated by the understanding that the problem of reason in its naturally fallen

state is that it tends to overstate or understate its own cognitive competence.

Only by striving to know what is untenable, even though somehow natural, in

reasons own inclinations can Kant and Husserl show the way to a consistent

adoption of a transcendentally altered way of thinking or changed atti-

tude, that will not only hold the dialectic of reason in check put also yield the

non-empirical insight necessary to reveal the perspicuity Wittgenstein denied

himself. Transcendental epistemology reveals such a goal of perspicuity

to be, contrary to Wittgensteins therapeutic intentions, yet another way in

which reasons natural instinct for systematic completeness discloses itself

as both inevitable and not fully dissolvable by recourse to merely empirical

investigations.131

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John McCarthy, Andrew Peach, Nicolas de Warren,

Henning Peucker, and Tom Nenon for helpful comments and criticisms. My

greatest debts are to the incisive critiques and suggestions from two anony-

mous referees.


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Notes

1. Many of the representative proponents of this view are the contributors in The New

Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (NY: Routledge, 2000). Crarys intro-

duction (118) shows what is common to the method employed by these contribu-

tors, namely, explaining linguistic therapy as a diagnosis and cure of conceptual pla-

tonism about meaning and the world, both in the late and the early Wittgenstein. An

excellent reading of this sort is James Conant, A Prolegomenon to the Reading of

Later Wittgenstein, in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction,

ed. Ludwig Nagel and Chantal Mouffe (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 93

130.

2. Wittgensteins Lectures, Cambridge, 193235, ed. Alice Ambrose (Totowa, NJ: Rowman

and Littlefield, 1979), 9899 and 108.

3. Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI), rev. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, third ed.(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 593; cf. Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G.H. von

Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.

4. Blue and Brown Books, second ed. (NY: Harper and Row, 1960), 59.

5. Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1974), 130.

6. PI 115.

7. PI 110.

8. PI 89 and 127.

9. PI 133.

10. PI 428. See also Philosophical Grammar, 462: Human beings are entangled all

unknowing in the net of language. One wonders whether a merely therapeutic view

of language games could yield the knowledge of the existence, not of the world as such,

but of an all-encompassing linguistic net.

11. PI 158.

12. Blue and Brown Books, 27.

13. Ibid., 5.

14. Ibid., 70.

15. Culture and Value, 15.

16. PI 100, 109, 110, 132 and On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright,

trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (NY: Harper and Row, 1969), 31 and 435.

17. PI 89, emphasis added.

18. PI 38.

19. Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 452; see also Philosophical Occa-

sions 19121951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993),

183.

20. O.K. Bouwsma, The Blue Book, inLudwig Wittgenstein: The Man andHis Philosophy,ed. K.T. Fann (NY: Dell, 1967), 158ff.

21. PI 133. Compare Philosophical Occasions, 195.

22. Zettel, 299.

23. Ibid., 382.

24. Jonathan Lear, The Disappearing We, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup-

plementary volume 58 (1984): 240241. Interestingly, Wittgenstein compares logical

analysis to psychoanalysis in the section Philosophy from the Big Typescript.


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interlocutors. His descriptive (as opposed to revisionary, or, as Wittgenstein would put

it, explanatory) metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought;

Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963), xiii.

Lears notionof an accountof ourmindedness is echoed in the following line: Descriptive

metaphysics describes some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in

terms of which we think about particular things. (2) It is no coincidence that Strawson

carries out the project in a Kantian spirit (xiii, 53).

47. PI 97.

48. PI 192.

49. Philosophical Occasions, 187.

50. Culture and Value, 15. See also Zettel 260.

51. Lear, Transcendental Anthropology, 288 and John McDowells Mind and World

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35.

52. Mind and World, 11. Finkelstein defines a platonist about meaning as someone who, inan effort to explain how mere noises and marks can have semantic significance, is driven

to positself-standing sources of significance items which stand to thesignificance of our

dead marks and noises as the sun stands to the light of the moon. See his Wittgenstein

on Rules and Platonism, in The New Wittgenstein, 5354. Crispin Wright puts it in the

following way: Platonism is, precisely, the view that the correctness of a rule-informed

judgmentis a matter quite independent of anyopinion of ours, whether the statesof affairs

which confer correctness are thought of as man-made constituted by over-and-done-

with episodes of explanation and linguistic behaviour or truly platonic and constituted

in heaven. Wittgensteins rule-following Considerations and the Central Project of

Theoretical Linguistics, in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. A. George (Oxford: Blackwell,

1989), 257.

53. On rules as rails, see Zettel 375, Philosophical Occasions, 429, McDowells Mind and

World, 92n., and David Pears, The False Prison: A Study in the Development of Wittgen-

steins Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10. McDowell claims

the platonist chafes and recoils from the vertigo of not having such rails in his Non-

cognitivism and Rule-following, in The New Wittgenstein, 43: The idea that consider-

ation of the relation of thought and reality requires the notion of an external standpoint

is characteristic of a philosophical realism. . .. This realism chafes at the fallibility and

inconclusiveness of all our ways of finding out how things are, and purports to confer a

sense on But is it really so? in which the question does not call for a maximally careful

assessment by our lights, but is asked from a perspective transcending the limitations of

our cognitive powers. (46)

54. We learnand teach wordsin certain contexts,and then we areexpected, andexpect others,

to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will

take place (in particular,not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules),

just as nothing insures that we will make, understand, the same projections. . .. Human

speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less,than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (because it is)

terrifying. Stanly Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (NY: Scribners, 1969), 52.

55. On dialectic, seeAliceCrarys Introductionin The New Wittgenstein, 79,and Finkelstein,

Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism.

56. Mind and World, 19, 77, 91, and 110. Rampant platonism is opposed to his innocent

form of naturalized platonism, which is based on the recognition that we need to allow for

the satisfaction of our desire for clarity about meaning that is not wholly subjective (91).


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302 DANIEL J. DWYER

Given our argument above that Wittgenstein strives in a similar way to satisfy our desire

forperspicuity, it is no surprise,then,that McDowell conceivesof thenaturalizedplatonist

as simply concerned with Wittgensteinian reminders (PI 127).

57. Mind and World, 17677.

58. On the importance of hinge propositions, see John Cook, The Metaphysics of

Wittgensteins On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations 8 (1985): 81119 and his

Wittgensteins Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

59. Mind and World, 159. McDowell even admits that the idea of a transcendental consti-

tution of consciousness sounds harder to rehabilitate, but perhaps even that would not be

impossible. (155n.)

60. Ibid., 177.

61. See his Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality, in Journal of

Philosophy 95 (1998): 431491 and Experiencing the World in Reason and Nature,

ed. Marcus Willaschek (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 318.62. P.M.S. Hacker is perhaps the most insistent commentator on the fullness and complete-

ness of therapeutic cure and the resulting satisfaction of our reflective desires; see his

Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, 107117.

63. PI 255.

64. If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be

interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?

Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general

facts of nature. . .. If anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones,

and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize then

let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used

to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible.

(PI, 195) Also relevant here are Strawsons Kantian-inspired descriptive metaphysics and

the notion of scaffolding of facts at Zettel 350.

65. Lear, Transcendental Anthropology, 277.

66. Ibid., 273 and 280.

67. Kenneth Westphal, Epistemic Reflection and Cognitive Reference in Kants Transcen-

dental Response to Scepticism, Kant-Studien 94 (2003): 151. Recall the Tractatus,

5.5563: Allpropositionsof ourcolloquial language areactually, just as they are, logically

completely in order. Were this not so, then language could not be capable of representing

reality at all.

68. Philosophical Grammar, 190.

69. PI 241242.

70. Lear, The Disappearing We, 229.

71. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 271/B 327. All parenthetical references in the text

will be to this translation and the page numbers will refer to the Akademie edition.

72. A wholly natural antithetic. . .

into which reason falls of itself and even unavoidably;and thus it guards reason against the slumberof an imagined conviction, such as a merely

one-sided illusion produces, but at the same time leads reason into the temptation either

to surrender itself to a skeptical hopelessness or else to assume an attitude of dogmatic

stubbornness. . .. Either alternative is the death of a healthy philosophy, though the form

might also be called the euthanasia of pure reason. (A 407/ B 434) The dialecticalroleof

Hume, the naturalist of pure reason, is to play the taskmaster of the dogmatic sophist

for a healthy critique of the understanding and of reason itself. (A 855/B 883).


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73. Good examples of Kants use of the descriptive sense of natural are to be found in the

following preliminary passages of the Critique: Human reason . . . inexorably pushes

on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential

use of reason. (B 21) How is metaphysics as a natural predisposition possible? i.e., how

do the questions that pure reason raises, and which it is driven by its own need to answer

as well as it can, arise from the nature of universal human reason? (B 22) [Critique

deals] merely with itself, with problems that spring entirely from its own womb, and that

are not set before it by the nature of things that are distinct from it but through its own

nature. (B 23)

74. See also Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, second edition, trans. James W.

Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), Ak 328.

75. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, second rev. edition by P.H. Nidditch

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 167168.

76. Inaugural Dissertation, in Kants Latin Writings, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York:Peter Lang, 1992), 14849.

77. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 215, Ak. V:

342.

78. Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. Charles T. Wolfe

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 78.

79. See Michelle Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 91: Kants point seems to be that because of the failure to

recognize the kind-distinction between sensible and intellectual distinctions, the tran-

scendental use of the understanding inadvertently (and perhaps unavoidably) falls victim

to applying sensible (spatiotemporal) predicates as if they were universal conditions of

objects in general. This account of the transcendental employment of concepts is thus

the critical analogue to the theory of subreption in the Dissertation.

80. See Grier,Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, ch. 4, Karl Ameriks, The Critique

of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant,

ed. Paul Guyer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249279, and Susan

Nieman, The Unity of Reason (NY Oxford University Press, 1992).

81. In all judgments illusion rests on the confusion of the subjective and the objective,

especially in the case of the principles of reason, where subjective grounds can also be

[mistaken for] objective grounds; Reflexion 5058, cited in Grier, Kants Doctrine of

Transcendental Illusion, 278.

82. Westphal, Epistemic Reflection and Cognitive Reference, 141.

83. The attempt to think [objects as they are thought merely through reason] will provide a

splendid touchstone of what we assume as the altered way of our way of thinking, namely

that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them. (B

xviii). On transcendental reflection, see also A xvixvii, A 51/B 7576, A 261/B 317,

and A 260/B 316.

84. The secondary literature on transcendental reflection is rather sparse. See Longuenesse,Kants Capacity to Judge, 113 and 126127 and Westphals Epistemic Reflection and

Cognitive Reference, 138 and 141.

85. Either, it would seem, the metaphysical conclusions are inevitable, in which case the

accompanying errors are unavoidable, or it is possible to correct, or avoid altogether,such

errors; Grier, Kants Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 5. Grier works out a helpful

distinction between the illusions that give rise to the fallacies of the Transcendental Di-

alectic and the actual fallacies themselves, and takes the former to be unavoidable and the


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304 DANIEL J. DWYER

latter to be avoidable (910). She argues furthermore that one must take seriously Kants

claim that illusion is necessary in a way that both leads us to metaphysical wandering

and in some way makes knowledge possible (5).

86. Prolegomena, Ak 329, 339.

87. Kants boldnesson thiscount does not endin the prefaces. On the lastpage ofthe Critique

he claims that his goal before the end of the 18th century is to bring human reason to

full satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its lust for

knowledge. (A 855/B 883)

88. On the juridical metaphor that governs this idea of conflicting parties within reason itself,

see Dieter Henrich, Kants Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background

of the First Critique, inKants Transcendental Deductions, ed. EckartForster (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1989), 3839, and Ian Proops, Kants Legal Metaphor and

the Nature of a Deduction, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 209229.

89. On the metaphysical eros of Kantian reason, see Richard Velkley, Freedom and the Endof Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).

90. What Does it Mean to OrientOneself in Thinking?, inReligion withinthe Boundaries of

Mere Reason, ed.and trans.Allen Woodand George di Giovanni (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1998), Ak 140n.

91. Prolegomena, Ak 328.

92. Kant even claims that dialectical inferences in the paralogisms have a transcendental

ground in the nature of human reason [that will] bring with it an unavoidable, although

not insoluble, illusion. (A 341/B 399)

93. It should be noted that sensibility, understanding, and reason are not understood by the

pre-transcendental Husserl as separate human faculties but rather as different aspects of

the subjects constitutive achievement of knowledge. For Husserl, reason is not a faculty

above and beyond understanding and sensibility but rather a title for the rational way in

which understanding arisesout of sensibility in a waythat is normally and normatively

continuous. The genesis of rational activity arises in such a way as to preserve the proto-

rational structures of sensibility but in a higher form, that of conceptually articulated

experience.SeeProlegomenato Pure Logic, inLogical Investigations, ed.Dermot Moran,

trans. John Findlay (NY: Routledge), vol. 1, 216217.

94. Prolegomena, Ak 361362. From a phenomenological point of view, the awareness of

the boundary of consciousness is evidence for the givenness within consciousness it-

self of that boundary, understood as the givenness of the intentional reference to that

which transcends the field of consciousness. Idea, 35. Indeed the phenomenon qua phe-

nomenon has the intrinsic quality of a relating-itself-to-something-transcendent. So a

kind of erotic directedness to the world as the horizon of all objectivity is characteristic

of all kinds of intentionality, not just the intentions of the absolute ideals of Kantian

reason. What is disclosed in the phenomenological attitude is the very meaning of tran-

scendence as given within the realm of the immanence of pure consciousness. Any other

notion of the meaning of transcendence, as if it were conceivable entirely apart fromthe conscious intending of natural, objective, extramental reality, runs into the problem

of the metabasis which then occasions the dialectic of naturalism, and ultimately the

dialectic of realism and idealism. For the latter are theories which share the assump-

tion that immanence is something internal to the mind and transcendence is something

external to the mind. Husserl gets beyond this inside-outside dichotomy by uncovering

from within the different ways in which the internal and the external are given to the

subject.


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95. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, Husserliana XXIV, ed. Ullrich Melle

(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 197, hereafter Einleitung.

96. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, 15.

97. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Akademie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902), Ak

18, R4936.

98. In this regard Heideggers anecdote is revealing: Gottingen 1913: For a whole semester

Husserls students argued about how a mailbox looks. Using this kind of treatment,

one then moves on to talk about religious experiences as well. If that is philosophy,

then I, too, am all for dialectic; Ontology, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 1999), 86. Also telling is Husserls all too brief and superficial

discussion of romantic Hegelianism as generating both the naturalism and historicism

of the nineteenth century; see Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, in Phenomenology

and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (NY: Harper, 1965), 7677.

99. See Diltheys Ideen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, inGesammelte Schriften, Band 5 (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1964), 156 and 159.

100. Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 55. The spirit of the methodological point here is captured

nicely by Aristotle: It belongs to an educated person to seek such certitude as the nature

of that thing allows. (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b24)

101. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 62, hereafter

Idea.

102. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 79.

103. Ibid., 107

104. What is taken for granted in natural thinking is the possibility of cognition. Constantly

busy producing results, advancing from discovery to discovery in newer and newer

branches of science, natural thinking finds no occasion to raise the question of the

possibility of cognition as such. . .. Cognition is a fact in nature. It is the experience of

a cognizing organic being. It is a psychological fact; Idea, 15.

105. Idea, 63.

106. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 109.

107. Ibid., 120.

108. On the species relativism of psychologism, see Prolegomena to Pure Logic, section

36, in Logical Investigations, vol. I.

109. If we combine with this the extraordinarily strong tendency to judge in a transcendent

sense whenever a transcendently directed act of thought occurs and a judgment is to be

based upon such an act, thus falling into a metabasis eis allo genos, then we can give

a sufficient and complete deduction of the following epistemological principle: in every

epistemological investigation, into whatever type of knowledge, the epistemological

reduction must be performed, that is, all transcendence that comes into play here must

be excluded, must be supplied with the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity,

with an index that says: the existence of all transcendent entities, whether I believe in

them or not, does not concern me here; this is not the place to pass judgment on theissue, to do so is entirely beside the point; Idea, 30.

110. Husserl dramatizes what is at stake in missing the genuine sense of epistemology

by using religious imagery of the temptation and subsequent fall of modern reason:

The specifically epistemological sin, the sin against the holy spirit of philosophy,

and unfortunately also the original sin, in which the human being who has awoken

from the condition of epistemological innocence necessarily falls, is the confusion of

consciousness and soul, of epistemology and psychology; Einleitung, 176.


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306 DANIEL J. DWYER

111. Prolegomena, Ak 363.

112. Ibid., Ak 313.

113. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 143.

114. Ideas I, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), section 30.

115. Ibid., Section 55.

116. The Crisis of European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press), 145.

117. But it is important to note that phenomenology does not ultimately renounce all of

natural reasons realistic instincts as it were it attempts to justify, account for, and

ultimately redeem its openness to and pretheoretical engagement with the world. Indeed,

the philosophical should not replace the prephilosophical and teleological directedness

toward truth, but rather situate and contemplate it. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction

to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 198. We may

compare this point to Kants claim in the first Critique that transcendental idealism isultimately compatible with empirical realism. (A 370)

118. See Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 136.

119. Klaus Held, Husserls Phenomenological Method, trans. Lanei Rodemeyer, in The

New Husserl (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 23.

120. Eine durchaus unnat urliche Denkrichtung; Einleitung, 165. Such a direction of

thought is characterized as remote from natural thinking in Ideas I, xvii.

121. Husserls Introduction to the six Logical Investigations, 169171.

122. Idea, 31.

123. Ibid., 18, emphasis added.

124. Husserl has in mind here Locke and his 19th century experimental psychologist heirs.

As long as we are in the condition of epistemological innocence and have not taken

from the tree of the philosophical app

witt gen stein, kant and husserl on the dialectical temptations of reason

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