A Plea for (Fichtean) Hypothetical Idealism: Exosomatic Evolution and the Empiricism of the Transcendental

Abstract

The innate predisposition of living beings to orient themselves in their worlds is made possible by what some evolutionary epistemologists refer to as a “hypothetical realism.”¹ This term suggests that creatures have a kind of “abstract” and “innate hypothesis” that seeks confirmation through success and coherence in the external world.² This internal evolutionary hardwired cognition, which Kant, for instance, would call a priori, seems at first glance to be more idealist than realist in flavor. Now a more evolutionary interpretation of the Kantian categories by Konrad Lorenz and others tends to read the a priori as an evolutionary a posteriori.³ Lorenz’s point is that what now appears as an a priori condition began as an empirical experience. Thus, Lorenz asks, “Is not human reason with all its categories and forms of intuition something that has organically evolved in a continuous cause-effect relationship with the laws of human nature, just as has the human brain?”⁴ Yet where exactly is this empirically constituted a priori, and to what extent should we continue to approach it by means of a transcendental method — even an expanded one?⁵