Abstract
The chapter follows the various stages in the development of the paradigm of production in the modern age, with a particular attention to how, first with Kant and then—and especially—with Fichte, it came to establish itself as the foundation of the natural-scientific psychology and the life sciences up to present-day cognitive neurosciences. Helmholtz grafted Fichte’s philosophy onto the very heart of physiology, producing two remarkable consequences: (a) he disclosed a new method of investigation that via Magnus, DeBarenne, and McCulloch ushered in a new—and still contemporary—era in the mathematical modeling of natural phenomena; (b) he laid the physiological foundations for the development of technologies in the image and likeness of man.
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- 1.
According to Foucault, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the beginning of a judicial age characterized by the ambition to govern whole peoples through juridical structures.
- 2.
It is on this ontological basis that Descartes grasps the subject as the foundation of metaphysics, as the origin of methodological certainty. The subject of the method is the formal I which stands vis-à-vis objects. It is this “methodical” I, the same subject envisaged by ancient ontology, that possesses knowledge of… (GA 28 1997). The I is the source of judgment by virtue of its essence. (“Dieses Urteilssubjekt wird vom Urteilen nicht erst aufgesucht und vorgefunden, sondern es liegt im Urteilen selbst – schlechthin,” p. 120).
- 3.
“Es ist schwerlich zu begreifen, wie ein anderer intuitiver Verstand stattfinden sollte als der göttliche. Denn der erkennt in sich als Urgründe (und archetypo) aller Dinge Möglichkeit; aber endliche Wesen können nicht aus sich selbst andere Dinge erkennen, weil sie nicht ihre Urheber sind, es sei denn die blossen Erscheinungen, die sie a priori erkennen können. Man meint aber, dass alle Erkenntnis a priori Erkenntnis der Dinge an sich selbst ist; sie ist aber gerade das Gegenteil, sondern allemal nur der Dinge als Erscheinungen, d. i. als Gegenstände der Erfahrung. Daher können wir die Dinge an sich selbst nur in Gott erkennen*).”
- 4.
Intelligence is not confined to the activity of knowledge acquisition, but extends to acting morally, as an end in itself. The “I act” provides a crucial link between the personalitas trascendentalis and the personalitas moralis.
- 5.
Persons, conceived as intelligences, are distinguished qua spiritual substances from natural entities, understood as corporeal substances. As intelligences, they are characterized by spontaneity—the capacity to bring about certain effects starting from themselves—and by receptivity, which is to say, the capacity to receive the “affections” engendered by another substance.
- 6.
The expression personalitas trascendentalis describes I-ness, understood in general ontological terms—that I-ness which makes empirical determinations possible. The experience of this I-ness is bound to underlie every factual experience. It is crucial to stress that the psychological subject that experiences inner sense must not be confused with the subject of the pure self-awareness on which it rests. In other words, the range of inner states where the I is the object of inner sense always presupposes an awareness of that substantial and immutable I (pure I), which is known as the ground of one’s experience, in all of its variety. According to Kant, by its very essence, the I of pure self-awareness can only be a subject, whereas the psychological I can only be an object.
- 7.
“The faculty of inner intuition is inner sense. Inner sense is the consciousness of our representations themselves. It has the soul as its object” (p. 250. Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics).
- 8.
“The fact of being aware of myself is a thought that already entails a double I: the I as subject and the I as object. … But what is intended by this is not a double personality, because only the I who think and intuit are the person, whereas the I of the object that is intuited by me is, like other objects outside me, the thing” (Kant, p. 249). Heidegger observes: “That the I of transcendental apperception is logical … only means that the being of this I is problematic; according to Kant it is in general indeterminable, and in any case in principle not capable of determination by means of psychology. The personalitas psychologica presupposes the personalitis trascendentalis” (cit. G 24 p. 125).
- 9.
Along with the first two books of The System of Ethics and the first book of Foundations of Natural Right, this Introduction contributes to a clearer understanding of Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794) and Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1798), which provide an overview of the issues which Fichte investigated in his Jena years.
- 10.
This issue is chiefly explored by Kant in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.
- 11.
“Ich finde mich als wirkend in der Sinnenwelt.”
- 12.
“The subject of consciousness and the principle of agency are one” (sec. 4). Herein lies the unity between theoretical and practical knowledge.
- 13.
Emphasizing how this vision of the I tallies with the Kantian perspective of the critique of immediacy (according to which no datum is “what” it is for a human knower by virtue of its giveness alone), Michael Baur (2003) writes: “Any suggestion that the self might be more adequately defined by reference to something other than its own activity implicitly involves the problematic claim that there is some datum or content, as merely given, that is necessarily determinative for the self’s activity in knowing” (p. 106).
- 14.
- 15.
In order to account for this intertwining, Fichte develops concepts such as those of purpose, embodiment, will, and freedom, which were carried through the nineteenth century into modern cognitive sciences. These concepts inspired contemporary themes such as those of self-reference, self-organization, ownership, agency, etc.
- 16.
What we have here is the concept of task (Zweckbegriff), which was destined to play a crucial role in von Helmholtz’s epistemology.
- 17.
This view has consequences for the concept of perception, which according to Fichte has no direct relation to the object: “I sense only myself and my own state, not the state of the object.” It is this framework of sensations that constitutes the transcendental condition of the determination of “alterability” or “affectability.”
- 18.
Angelica Nuzzo writes: “Fichte’s account of the human body—first Korper and then Leib—is framed by three different but interconnected issues: (a) the issue of the self’s or person’s act of embodiment; (b) the issue of the person’s relation to another individual as a similarly embodied rational being; (c) and the assumption (or the possibility for me of assuming) that the other’s body is the same in kind as my own” (p. 73, 2006).
- 19.
Turner rightly notes that this way of framing the problem opened the way to study the sense organs mathematically and mechanically by analogy with inorganic models (1977, p. 54).
- 20.
It is important to bear in mind that, according to Kant, it is the pure intellect which provides the foundations—the principles—for the objectivity of objects and that the objects he has in mind are those of physics and mathematics. What this means is that things, as physical-mathematical objects, are understood starting from the fundamental principle according to which each body left to itself will move with uniform rectilinear motion. In this respect, what determines each thing is understood in advance (a priori), and, at the same time, the (invariably uniform) setting in which things manifest themselves is defined. Things thus become physico-mathematical objects, insofar as they are set and arranged within the framework of the uniform spatiotemporal connection between movements. The fact that things are all mobile in terms of space, time, and relations of motion is what makes numerical measuring possible. Kant’s research is intended to establish the pure intellect as the foundation of the objectivity of phenomena. Principles are precisely what provide the basis for this. Kant divides principles into four groups: (1) axioms of intuition (quantity), (2) anticipations of perception (quality), (3) analogies of experience (relation), and (4) postulates of experience in general. Along much the same lines, when medicine later established itself as a natural science, it came to understand the functions of the living body in the light of the fundamental principle of the logic of the dead body and hence of the mechanization of the living body (see par. ch. 3).
- 21.
In a study of visual hallucinations, Ueber die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen (“On Fantasy Images”), Muller had shown that the visual system is an active rather than passive recorder of external events. In a series of rigorous self-experiments, having noticed that just before falling asleep he could sometimes see imaginary people and scenes, he tried to manipulate these figures (Otis 2007).
- 22.
These opening pages of volume 3 show a striking affinity with the notion of phenomenological reduction that is realized by putting natural aptitudes aside—what enables the constitution of objects according to Husserl’s phenomenology.
- 23.
“Relatively few but well performed experiments are enough to allow me to see the original causal conditions of an event with greater certainty than a millionfold observations by which I could not arbitrarily vary the conditions…. We learn how to make reliable judgments of the causes of our sense perceptions only when we place, through our own will, our sense organs into different perspectives to the objects. Such experimenting happens from early youth onwards” (Optics, p. 451, quoted in Cahan 1993 p. 483).
- 24.
“The psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain place there is a certain object of a certain character are generally not conscious activities, but unconscious ones … it may be permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary perception as unconscious conclusions, thereby making a distinction of some sort between them and the common so-called conscious conclusions” (p. 4, Vol. 3).
- 25.
“The chief reason, however, why the power of any experiment to convince is so much greater than that of observing a process going on without our assistance is that with the experiment the chain of causes runs through our own self-consciousness. We know one member of these causes—our will’s impulse—from inner intuition and know the motive by which it has occurred” (p. 358).
- 26.
If the experience in question does not lead to the desired results, or if our sensations change independently of our will, then we will posit the existence of external objects as the cause of the observed changes. “Those alterations which we can produce and revoke by conscious impulses of the will are distinct from those which are not consequences of such impulses and cannot be eliminated by them.”
- 27.
It is interesting to note that although these authors, with different emphases, have all grasped the relation between Helmholtz and Husserl, they have completely overlooked—as indeed Husserl himself did in his 1903 seminars on Fichte (Hart 1995, Husserl Studies)—the importance of the sense of agency for Fichte and hence for Helmholtz’s thought. For a critical overview of the relation between Husserl’s philosophy as expressed in Ding und Raum and the naturalistic approach, see Costa’s introduction to the Italian translation of this text.
- 28.
Magnus identifies the following starting conditions for the study of animal posture: (1) reflex standing, (2) normal distribution of tone, (3) attitude, intended as the harmonizing of the position of the different parts of the body with each other, and (4) righting function, that is, if an animal is brought out of the normal resting posture, then a series of reflexes are evoked to reach the normal position again (Magnus 1925).
- 29.
Nervous impulses, which can influence posture, arise (1) from the labyrinths, (2) from the proprioceptive sense organs, (3) from exteroceptive nerve endings of the body surface, and (4) from teleceptors, reacting to distance stimuli, such as the eye, the ear, and the nose (Magnus 1925).
- 30.
Foreshadowed here is the key theme of the second cybernetics.
- 31.
“The principle of the method is very simple. Local application of moderate heat to the exposed cortex for short periods of time results in destruction of the nervous tissue. By using different temperatures and different periods of application it is possible to ‘dose’ the depth of the destruction, and thus to produce laminar lesions” (p. 517) (1934).
- 32.
Clearly, it is also by ignoring these aspects that the various currents of psychotherapy have been able to casually adopt modelizations based on this approach, without realizing that they are in fact impossible to apply, precisely on account of the defining features of the kind of practice in which they are rooted.
- 33.
Wenn ich aber Körper sehe so sehe Ich keine Substanzen sondern Erscheinungen. Ich kann auch gar nicht di Substanzen vernehmen; denn kein Wesen, als der Schöpfer allein, kann die Substanzen eines andern Dinges vernehmen (p. 97 Kant 1972). “When I see bodies, I do not see any substances, but rather phenomena. I cannot perceive substances at all. No being except the creator can perceive the substance of another thing.”
- 34.
Among the many interpreters of McCulloch’s work, only Arbib (2000) would appear to have acknowledged the important role which the Kantian perspective played in the development of his research.
- 35.
From this perspective it is possible to understand McCulloch’s great interest in the work of Craik, who had been the first to develop a psychology in which mental models played a leading role. “Craik thought of human memory as a model of the world with us in it, which we update every tenth of a second for position, every two tenths for velocity, and every three tenths for acceleration as long as we are awake” (McCulloch p. 10, 1974). McCulloch was also responsible for the posthumous publication of Craik’s works. This line of research spawned the psychology of mental models (Johnson-Laird 2005).
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Arciero, G., Bondolfi, G., Mazzola, V. (2018). Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology. In: The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78087-0_2
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