F. A. Trendelenburg and the Neglected Alternative

Abstract

Despite his impressive influence on nineteenth-century philosophy, F. A. Trendelenburg's own philosophy has been largely ignored. However, among Kant scholars, Trendelenburg has always been remembered for his feud with Kuno Fischer over the subjectivity of space and time in Kant's philosophy. The topic of the dispute, now frequently referred to as the ‘Neglected Alternative’ objection, has become a prominent issue in contemporary discussions and interpretations of Kant's view of space and time. The Neglected Alternative contends that Kant unjustifiably moves from the claim that we have a priori intuitions of space and time to the sceptical conclusion that space and time are exclusively subjective. Most current discussions trace the objection back to Trendelenburg and often use him to motivate the objection. However, to date Trendelenburg's actual arguments and reasons for rejecting the Kantian view of space and time have not been sufficiently uncovered; my goal here is to fill this lacuna. By better understanding what Trendelenburg actually argued, we will be in a better position to assess whether the Neglected Alternative objection against Kant is successful. But in addition, Trendelenburg's own system is of independent philosophical interest, and my work here will shed light on one part of it.

Keywords:

• F. A. Trendelenburg
• Neglected Alternative
• Immanuel Kant
• neo-Kantianism
• space
• time
• Kuno Fischer
• nineteenth-century philosophy
• motion
• German philosophy

Notes

1 For comments on ancestors of this paper, I am greatly indebted to Fred Beiser, Jake Browning, Shane Callahan, an audience at the University of South Florida, and the anonymous referees and editor of the Journal. I also thank Tara Harvey for her advice on translation.

²In addition to Köhnke's neo-Kantianism book, see Hartung and Köhnke, eds., Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburgs Wirkung and Beiser, Late German Idealism.

³Henry Allison revived the debate over the objection with his article ‘The Non-spatiality of Things in Themselves for Kant’. The debate shows no sign of letting up; since 2007 alone, there have been at least three articles providing new defences of Kant against the Neglected Alternative and two articles reinforcing the Neglected Alternative against Kant. In favour of Kant, see Bird, ‘Trendelenburg, Fischer and Kant’; Hogan, ‘Three Kinds of Rationalism’; and Rosefeldt, ‘Subject-Dependence and Trendelenburg's Gap’. In support of the Neglected Alternative objection, see Herissone-Kelly, ‘Transcendental Ideality of Space’ and Kanterian, ‘Trendelenburg Versus Kant, Fischer and Bird’.

⁴The objection ultimately originates in the early reception to the Critical philosophy in the 1780s. Of the philosophers in this time period, H. A. Pistorius developed the most thorough formulation of the Neglected Alternative in his various reviews. See especially his ‘Erläuterung über … ’

⁵Hereafter, I will abbreviate references to this work with ‘LU, page number’. I cite the 1862 edition, since it is the one that sparked the dispute over the Neglected Alternative and the additions in the 1870 edition do not concern the issues we will discuss. All translations of German texts (excepting Kant) are my own. On Kant texts and translations, see note 10.

⁶Herbart himself appears in the Logische Untersuchungen as an essential philosopher for Trendelenburg. At the beginning of the work, Trendelenburg characterizes his system as tracing a path through the Hegelian and Herbartian schools (vii). It is also noteworthy that Trendelenburg devotes far more pages in the Logische Untersuchungen to discussing Herbart's view of space and time than he spends discussing Kant's view.

⁷See especially LU, 136–40, where Trendelenburg argues that an action or activity [Thätigkeit] must be what unites thought and being and LU, 141–54 for the argument that this unifying activity is motion.

⁸He argues further that even if space and time were finished products, motion would be required to give unity to each of them (LU, 149).

⁹Trendelenburg also objects to Kant's seemingly insufficient and conflicting view of motion. It is insufficient, because Kant fails to show how it is that the a priori intuitions of space and time come together and create motion. But Kant ultimately descends into inconsistency, because in the Aesthetic, he is adamant that motion presupposes space and time, but in the Deduction he seems to reverse course and argue that motion (in the form of synthesis) underlies our experience of space (LU, 165–6).

¹⁰He raises this possibility in the Transcendental Aesthetic when he says that ‘we cannot judge at all whether the intuitions of other thinking beings are bound to the same conditions that limit our intuition and that are universally valid for us’ (A27/B43; see also B72). In addition, the infinite being, God, certainly does not intuit objects in space and time. (Note: I follow the Guyer and Wood translation of the Critique of Pure Reason and employ the standard A/B convention for citing the first and second editions of the Critique, respectively).

¹¹To put this in the terms of contemporary philosophy, in which necessary truths are usually considered to hold without condition, we can view Kant as holding that geometry has conditional necessity, where the condition is the constitution of human sensibility (cf. Falkenstein, Kant's Intuitionism, 267–8).

¹²That space has a Euclidean structure in particular is not essential to this discussion. What is essential is that geometry is about the structure of space (whatever it may be) and these truths about space are necessary. Kant holds that space has a Euclidean structure, and this is not a point of contention between Kant and Trendelenburg. Thus, I will specifically talk about Euclidean geometry when I need to clarify that I am talking about the laws that govern the actual space grounded in our a priori intuition.

¹³See Russell, Problems of Philosophy, chapter VIII and Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy, 154. The objections from Russell and Moore (though not Trendelenburg) are discussed in Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, 37–43. Falkenstein independently considers this kind of objection in his Kant's Intuitionism, 267–8.

¹⁴In the same section, Trendelenburg presents another challenge to transcendental idealism that directly targets its coherence. He argues that if things in themselves appear to us in space and time, then there must be something in the nature of things in themselves that makes this interaction possible and a fortiori this aspect of things in themselves must be spatiotemporal (LU, 161). Thus, Kant cannot coherently hold that objects appear to us in space and time without holding that things in themselves are spatiotemporal.

¹⁵This quotation is also translated in Scott-Taggart, ‘Recent Work on the Philosophy of Kant’, 184 and has been reprinted in various recent articles on the Neglected Alternative.

¹⁶In this context, Trendelenburg usually just uses the term ‘the things’ [die Dinge] rather than the Kantian ‘things in themselves’ [Dinge an sich] to refer to the objects that exist absolutely independently of ourselves. Here, I keep with the Kantian terminology in describing Trendelenburg's view. Cf. Fischer, Kants Vernunftkritik und deren Entstehung, vi and Grapengiesser, Kant's Lehre von Raum und Zeit, 68. See also LU, 340 for further discussion of ‘thing’.

¹⁷This is not to say that the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen as a whole was ignored. According to Köhnke, Trendelenburg's criticisms of Hegelianism were widely considered to be successful (Neukantianismus, 56). For further evidence, see the references in Beiser, Late German Idealism, 59n. See also Morris, ‘Vera on Trendelenburg’, 93 for the claim that Trendelenburg was the philosopher most responsible for the diminution of Hegel's logic.

¹⁸An updated version of his earlier Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, the work Trendelenburg criticizes in his second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen.

¹⁹For readers interested in the complete blow-by-blow account of the Trendelenburg/Fischer Streit, see Adair-Toteff, ‘Neo-Kantian Raum Controversy’; Beiser, Late German Idealism, 107–20; and Bratuscheck, ‘Kuno Fischer und Trendelenburg’.

²⁰Cf. Grapengiesser, Kant's Lehre von Raum und Zeit, 5. Though Kant does not directly describe them as subjective in the Aesthetic, he does make comments such as that space and time belong to ‘the subjective constitution of our mind’ (A23/B37–8) and that they are ‘subjective representations’ and ‘conditions’ (A28/B44). In the later essay ‘What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?’ Kant more directly describes space as subjective. See Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20: 269.

²¹Vaihinger argues that Trendelenburg's combining of issues of origin with issues of validity leads Trendelenburg's argument to become incoherent. See Vaihinger, Commentar II, 136–8. However, Vaihinger goes on to reformulate Trendelenburg's argument and ultimately agrees that the Neglected Alternative objection Trendelenburg had in mind succeeds.

²²See Vaihinger, Commentar II, 136–8 where he delineates the Ursprungsfrage and Geltungsfrage. My consideration of the Ursprungsfrage is importantly different from Vaihinger's however, in that I consider the origin of space itself, whereas Vaihinger inquiries about the origin of our representation of space.

²³The Simple Alternative is very similar to the views that Vaihinger and Edward Kanterian ascribe to Trendelenburg. See Commentar II, 139 and ‘Trendelenburg Versus Kant, Fischer and Bird’, 268.

²⁴Sebastian Gardner at one point interprets Trendelenburg as holding a view like this. See his Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 107. Kuno Fischer also interprets Trendelenburg in a similar way (see the block quotation above in the section ‘Kuno Fischer's Counter-attack’). Trendelenburg, however, contests the objections to his philosophy that Fischer develops on the basis of this characterization (‘Ueber eine Lücke’, 262–3).

²⁵Specifically, Kant uses the facts that space is infinite, that the entirety of space is more fundamental than its parts, and that we can only represent a single space as key premises in his argument for the claim that space is an a priori intuition. In the earlier Logische Untersuchungen, Trendelenburg does consider Kant's arguments for the intuitive nature of space (LU, 156–8 and 162–3) and actually endorses the view that we have an a priori intuition of space (223). Thus, my criticism applies specifically to the reconstruction in the ‘Ueber eine Lücke’ essay.

²⁶Trendelenburg enumerates the ways that motion exists in nature and then says,the same motion belongs to thought, though not in the same manner where a point in the motion of thought covers [deckt] the corresponding point of motion in nature externally. Nevertheless, there must be a counter-image [Gegenbild] of the same motion, because how would motion otherwise come up to consciousness?(LU, 142)Hence, Vaihinger's claim that Trendelenburg holds that the a priori representation of space completely corresponds to objective reality is inaccurate (Commentar II, 146).