All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (review)

Paul Franks' All or Nothing is in no sense an introduction to or history of German idealism, but an immensely sophisticated philosophical engagement with a specific complex of problems that occupied Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others—problems they believed themselves to have inherited from Kant's transcendental philosophy, as well as from its criticism by Jacobi, Maimon, Schulze, and others. According to Franks, these thinkers were involved in a common systematic project of "ultimate" or "absolute" grounding, while adopting various strategies to avoid "the Agrippan Trilemma," according to which any effort to justify an ultimate first principle must involve either (1) the purely arbitrary assertion or stipulation of the principle in question, (2) an infinite regress of explanatory principles, or (3) a viciously circular justification of the principle in question. Franks interprets the German idealists as engaged in a still vital effort to discover a form of philosophical grounding that does not fall victim to this skeptical trilemma. Their strategy for satisfying this demand for absolute grounding involved a distinction between the kind of reality enjoyed by the ground and that of the phenomenal world of experience, a distinction that would allow them to escape the Trilemma in the realm of transcendental philosophy while simultaneously demonstrating its inescapability in the realm of physical explanation.

Perhaps the most original aspect of Franks' interpretation is his recognition of a dualism implicit in their proposed strategy, even when combined with what he describes as their commitment to "Holistic Monism," in contrast with Kant's own "Monadic Individualism" with respect to things in themselves. Whereas Kant remained committed to a "two essences" view of the relationship between phenomenal reality and things in themselves, the German idealists adopted a "two aspects" view according to which "the empirical aspect of a thing corresponds to the way in which a thing's being as it is, is grounded in its relations to other things within the totality; the transcendental aspect of a thing corresponds to the way in which a thing's being as it is, is grounded in its relation to the totality and ultimately to the totality's absolute first principle" (145).

Rather than identifying the ens realissimum or absolute directly with its appearance (in the manner of Spinozistic monism) or arguing that the latter is in principle, but not in fact derivable from the former (in the manner of Leibniz), they instead undertook the ambitious project of actually deriving the latter from the former ("Derivation Monism"). A philosophical system of this type (of which Fichte's second Jena system, as expounded in his 1796–99 lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo is perhaps the best and most representative example, or, in any case, is the one most fully analyzed by Franks) is characterized by its insistence upon the differences between the transcendental (or philosophical) and the ordinary (or empirical) standpoints, and thus upon the differences between the kind of grounding appropriate to each

The model for such a system of grounding is provided by geometrical construction. But the method of transcendental deduction employed by Fichte and his fellow German idealists bears little resemblance to the kind of analytic, regressive (or "inferential") method that has been the topic of recent discussions of "transcendental arguments" by Strawson, Stroud, and others. Instead, the German idealists employ a synthetic, progressive method of proof, one which starts with an absolute that is different in kind from what is derived therefrom. In contrast, regressive transcendental arguments must always arrive at a ground that is homogenous with what is grounded and are therefore unable to escape the Agrippan Trilemma. Notoriously, such a method also requires a robust notion of the cognitive space within which such a priori construction is possible and of the distinctive method of the same: hence the importance within this tradition of the notion of "intellectual intuition"—a frequently misunderstood topic, of which Frank provides a sober and illuminating discussion. Indeed, this book contains the best...