Abstract
The physiologist Johannes Müller’s doctrine of specific nerve energies had a decisive influence on neo-Kantian conceptions of the objectivity of knowledge in the 1850–1870s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Müller amassed a body of experimental evidence to support his doctrine, according to which the character of our sensations is determined by the structures of our own sensory nerves, and not by the external objects that cause the sensations. Neo-Kantians such as Hermann von Helmholtz, F.A. Lange, and Otto Liebmann took Müller’s doctrine to have far-reaching consequences for their epistemologies. Over the course of the 1850–1870s, these three neo-Kantians, each in his own way, argued that reflection on Müller’s doctrine ruled out a certain conception of the objectivity of knowledge. It ruled out the view that knowledge is objective in virtue of affording us information about objects in a mind-independent external world.
This paper traces how Helmholtz, Lange, and Liebmann developed their arguments for this view, and how each developed his own alternative conception of objectivity, according to which objectivity has nothing to do with a mind-independent world. Finally, the paper concludes by considering why these arguments modelled on Müller’s doctrine would have been so powerful against rival post-Hegelian conceptions of objectivity, especially those of scientific materialists like Ludwig Büchner.
I am grateful to Alistair Isaac, Liesbet de Kock, and Alan Richardson for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Gary Hatfield for much helpful discussion.
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Notes
- 1.
My account thus contrasts with that of Daston and Galison (2010), who identify ways that scientists’ conceptions of objectivity changed in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to philosophical conceptions of the subject and subjectivity. I take my account to complement theirs, rather than contradict it, since the history of post-Kantian theories of objectivity is complicated and clearly contains contrasting trajectories of ideas.
- 2.
Helmholtz, unlike Lange and Liebmann, did not identify himself unambiguously as a neo-Kantian. I treat him here as a neo-Kantian partly because (as we will see in Sect. 6.3) he was at pains to emphasize the Kantian dimensions of his philosophy, and partly because his efforts to articulate a Kantian vision of philosophy set an agenda for philosophers like Lange, who did self-identify as neo-Kantian.
- 3.
I do not intend to endorse the sweeping epistemological generalization that Helmholtz, Lange, and Liebmann see as the epistemological insight of Müller’s doctrine, nor will I attempt much in the way of a defence of their view that Müller’s doctrine provides evidence for it. I here accept the generalization provisionally, only in order to uncover and evaluate Helmholtz’s, Lange’s, and Liebmann’s arguments about the consequences it would have, if true, for the concept of objectivity.
- 4.
For a detailed historical account of scientific materialism, see Gregory 1977.
- 5.
See Büchner 1855, 1–4/1864, 1–4 especially for his arguments that there is no matter without force inhering in it, and no force that does not in here in matter.
- 6.
For a more detailed account of Müller and his doctrine of specific nerve energies, see Boring 1929/1957: Ch. 5.
- 7.
Helmholtz is not alone among neo-Kantians who, prior to the mid-1860s, took the objective elements of our representations to be those determined by properties of external objects. See, for example, Zeller 1862/1877, 492.
- 8.
Thanks to Gary Hatfield for extremely helpful discussion on these points.
- 9.
- 10.
One might reasonably wonder why Helmholtz thinks he can infer that tokens of a single type of causal structure among sensations are all caused by tokens of a single type of causal structure among external objects: after all, the point of Müller’s experiments was to show that a single type of pattern among sensations can be occasioned by multiple, different types of stimuli. Of course, Helmholtz has not forgotten this. Thus, for example, sensations of flashes of light might be occasioned by either a light behind an aperture or by an electric current passed over the optic nerve. But at the same time, the experience of the physiologist doing the experiment consists of representations in two, distinct causal structures: one with representations of her subject sitting in front of the light and the aperture; the other with representations of her subject sitting wired to a battery. Thanks to Alan Richardson for pressing me to clarify this point.
- 11.
In the first edition of the History of Materialism, this view of our spatial representations becomes clear only in Lange’s argument against the crude nativist hypothesis that our representation of space is a “ready-made form” that we fill with sensations. Lange insists to the contrary that our representations of space are produced and shaped by physiological and psychological processes (Lange 1866, 254).
- 12.
This is an argument that Lange repeats and expands significantly in the second edition of History of Materialism. See Lange 1873–1875, 2:429/1925, 3:226. There he argues that, for example, the fact that our (human) space has three dimensions need not hold for other, differently constituted beings.
- 13.
I note without pursuing it that Lange, here and elsewhere, explicitly commits himself to a vision of Kantian theory of knowledge that is thoroughly naturalistic. Thus while there is a circularity involved in pointing to causal processes to explain the epistemological basis of causal inferences, he is committed to thinking that it is a benign circle.
- 14.
It is not clear that Lange consistently maintains his own stated view that he cannot (causally) infer the existence of mind-independent objects. See Edgar (2013) for a more detailed account of Lange on these points. However, whatever ambiguities his views have on these points, they do not appear in his discussions of objectivity, so I ignore them here.
- 15.
For Lange’s explicit discussion of the species-relative nature of our objective knowledge, see 1872–1875, 2:539–40/1925, 3:336.
- 16.
Lange suggests a nearly identical argument a few years later (Lange 1873–1875, 2:423/1925, 3:219).
- 17.
Also:
But the whole is and remains a sensible phenomenon within our consciousness, constituted out of subjective sensations, disciplined, interpreted, spatially arrayed, and objectified by irrefutable rules of our understanding, which we obey without knowing why. It thus has no absolute, but only a relative being; it exists only on the presupposition of our sensibility, in virtue of our intellectuality in our consciousness. (Liebmann 1869, 140–1)
- 18.
Further, like Lange, Liebmann recognizes that if our causal reasoning is valid only within the sphere of our representations, we cannot validly claim that our sensations are the effects on us of mind-independent objects. Consequently, Liebmann argues that most we can conceive of the relation of our sensations to mind-independent objects is that an unknowable X (the mind-independent object, the Kantian thing in itself) stands in an unknowable relation to our mind. He calls that unknowable relation the “transcendental factor” in experience (Liebmann 1869, 152–3).
- 19.
In fact, as Liesbet de Kock has recently shown, Helmholtz first clearly articulates his view that our belief in an external world is a mere hypothesis several months before his address “The Facts in Perception” in response to a criticism from J.P.N. Land. Although I cannot here give de Kock’s interpretation its due, I note that she gives an account of the development of Helmholtz’s views that contrasts sharply with the one I am offering. On her account, Helmholtz’s view in 1878 that our belief in an external world is merely a “hypothesis” that can never amount to knowledge does not constitute a substantive break from his earlier views. Rather, on her interpretation, Helmholtz was pushed in 1878 to articulate clearly a pessimism about our knowledge of the external world that he had maintained implicitly at least since the Physiological Optics if not before (de Kock 2014, 15–21).
- 20.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison emphasize this conception of objectivity. See Daston and Galison 2007/2010, especially Chs. 4–5. I note here without pursuing it that Helmholtz’s mature conception of objective representations as those that are not subject to our will appears to be just one of several, and not a conception of singular significance or influence – at least among neo-Kantians in the second half of the nineteenth century.
- 21.
I am indebted to Robert Brain for helpful discussion on these points.
- 22.
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Edgar, S. (2015). The Physiology of the Sense Organs and Early Neo-Kantian Conceptions of Objectivity: Helmholtz, Lange, Liebmann. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_6
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