Butts, R. The Grammar of Reason. Hamann's Challenge To Kant

The Grammar of Reason: Hamann's Challenge to Kant
Author(s): Robert E. Butts

Source: Synthese, Vol. 75, No. 2, Thought and Language in the Philosophy of the Enlightenment
(May, 1988), pp. 251-283
Published by: Springer
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ROBERT E. BUTTS
THE GRAMMAR OF REASON:

HAMANN'S CHALLENGE TO KANT
1.
Among the critical responses to his Critique of Pure Reason of which

Kant was almost unaware, or was disinclined to answer, are
surely
those of Herder (1799a, b) and Johann Hamann (1781, 1784). Her
der's immense two volume Metakritik appeared in 1799, long after
Kant had reacted to critically in his reviews of Herder's Philosophy of
Hamann's brief 1781 review was never published, and the longer, but
still highly compressed, Metakritik ?ber den Purismus der reinen Ver
nunft, appeared in 1800, twelve years after Hamann's death, and four
years before Kant's.1 By the time of the appearance of the Herder
volumes Kant had abandoned all philosophical hope for his former
student, whose Sturm und Drang opposition to Kant's rationalism
Kant had reacted to critically in his reviews of Herder's Philosophy of
History, and in the essay 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History'
(1786). As for Hamann, long before 1800 Kant had given up reading
his literary efforts, complaining that Hamann's lyrical style was largely
incomprehensible. Whatever Kant's final verdict on the work of two of
his most unorthodox may have been, those of us who
contemporaries
are interested in the total cultural response to the critical philosophy
must see both responses as raising intriguing questions about Kant's
system, questions almost completely neglected in more academic 18th
century discussions of the critical philosophy. Both Herder and
Hamann were anxious to promote theories of the nature and origins of
language, topics on which the Kantian writings are largely silent. It is
clear that nowhere in the entire corpus of Kant's writings is there any
sustained and systematic treatment of language. The Herder and
Hamann reviews challenge the critical philosophy at exactly this
fundamental point: how can the championing of the life of reason be
complete without integrating a philosophy of language into the
system?
I propose, then, to try to offer a Kantian response to Hamann's
critique;2 I will try to supply both references to some easily neglected
Synthese 75 (1988) 251-283.

? 1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
252 ROBERT E. BUTTS
thoughts on language that are to be found in Kant's writings, and an

analysis of why Kant did not make language a basic feature of the
critical philosophy. Hamann's challenge should be seen as a frontal
attack on Kant's account of the nature and role of Reason. The
born-again Christian Hamann needs a role for Reason that transcends
logic and method, consistency and system. Biblical revelation anchor
ing faith in the traditions of Christianity is Hamann's alternative to
Kant's rationally organized methodology, one best exemplified in the
mathematical physics of Newton. For Hamann, the difference is based
on crucially different ways of viewing language. In his view, the task
of committed mankind is the development of a symbol system that
concretely conveys the message of the divine revelation, while at the
same time accurately interpreting it. This contrasts with the task he
imputes to Kantian knowers, the task of developing an abstract
conceptual system in which mathematically precise concepts can be
systematically put at the service of empirical science. For Hamann, the
world is a divine epiphany; God is not so much a maker as a writer.
For Kant, the world is a complex set of spatio-temporal sensory givens
systematic understanding of which is fixed in form, but in practice
must be never-ending; God is not the knowable real source of this
world, but is the unachievable ideal which focuses our scientific
imagination. Let me supply some details of the Hamann critique.
2.
Hamann called his philosophy "verbalism"; the word refers to a

metaphysics of the divine word (logos). Lewis White Beck has usefully
summarized this verbalism in four theses (Beck 1969, pp. 376-77):
(1) Nature, and History are the Word of God, the language by
Scripture,
which he speaks to man.
(2) The of man is a language close to God's, a language of

proper language
sensuous symbols reflecting naive experience and conveying God's mes
sage to us, which man must receive by divine instruction.
(3) There is a human of pseudo-reason which uses abstractions and

language
artificial constructions, and which tries, unsuccessfully, to cut the umbili
cus to sensibility, emotion, and God's world.
(4) There is a human language of prophecy and poetry which is like the divine
language in that it creates its own sensuously present objects.
I will not provide detailed analysis of this metaphysics of language; my
THE GRAMMAR OF REASON 253
purpose here is not exegesis of Hamann's vastly complex foreshadow

ing of Christian existentialism. For now, note only that what Hamann
offers us is a view of human knowledge that makes all items to be
known divine revelations. These revelations are expressed in two
- sensuous and emo
forms of language: God's direct language the
tional content of our immediate experience, and the language of
inscriptions and sounds that we use to interpret or "translate" God's
direct language, a language in whose use we are instructed by God
(or, which comes to the same thing, by the Christian tradition cor
rectly understood). If one must choose, then, between the language of
the philosophers, a language that abstracts and idealizes (and that in
its worst form simplifies the world by mathematizing its apparent
structures), and the language of the poet, whose symbolic represen
tation of the world makes new contents of immediate sensation, signs
that are both emblems and directly felt objects, one is forced by one's
Christian commitment to choose the latter. After all, the central
orientation of Christian faith is acceptance of the Logos (The Word,
God) become flesh. Thus truly communicative language permits us to
be "witnesses" for Jesus the Christ.3 The best human language is not
one fitted for use in logic and mathematics, and certainly not in school
metaphysics, but one best adapted to create more meaningful direct
sensory contacts with God.4
With this much as background, we can already begin to see how
drastic the differences between Hamann and Kant must have been.
Central to Hamann's metaphysics is a direct repudiation of the kind of
epistemology and ontology represented in the Critical philosophy. We
are not surprised to learn, then, that Hamann's review and metacri
tique take Kant to task for, in short, having bothered to philosophize
at all! The 1781 review is only 4 pages long, and enters only one
substantive challenge to Kant: if one admits, as Kant does (A15/B29),
that the two branches of knowledge, sensibility and understanding,
come from a common root which is unknown to us, why expend so
much effort on keeping them separate, as the Kantian account surely
insists that we do? This charge is repeated in Metakritik (MPRV); I
will return to it below.
Some have understood the Metakritik as an attempted reductio ad
absurdum of Kant's first Critique, a reading that can only be sustained
if we bear in mind that hardly any logical challenges are offered. In
reading Hamann it is always difficult to be sure one knows what he
254 ROBERT E. BUTTS
intended (Beck 1969, p. 381 classes him with the mystic B?hme in
degree of obscurity), but I will hazard the suggestion that the work is a
verbal parody of a number of seriously intended philosophical objec
tions to Kant's strategy, objections motivated by Hamann's own
philosophical and religious commitments. I think there are serious
charges disguised in this work, ones Kant would have understood,
and, I will argue below, ones Kant in fact did seek to answer in a
number of his writings. Note that although Kant probably never read
MPRV, he was most certainly aware of some of the details of
Hamann's Christian philosophy. I would suggest, indeed, that many of
Kant's substantive moves against alleged knowledge of the supersen
sible were either directed at Hamann, or at figures (Swedenborg, for
example) who held views on language much like those of Hamann.
And even if I am wrong in that, then Kant's arguments against
Swedenborg and others can surely be adapted to count as arguments
against Hamann.
Hamann opens his metacriticism5 by intimating that the transcen
dental philosophy rests upon the "twofold impossibility" of determin
ing, prior to all experience, the possibility of human cognition of
objects of experience, and the possibility of sensuous intuition. To this
Hamann adds that "the immense" distinction between analytic and
synthetic judgments also plays a central role, and that reason, now
deprived of all
conceptual (empirical, aesthetic, logical, and dis
cursive) operations, consists merely in subjective conditions "in which
everything, something and nothing can be thought as the object,
source or mode of cognition, and can be given, if need be can be
taken, as an infinite maximum or minimum for direct intuition" (p.
214). As a summary of Kant's major claims in KRV Hamann's
observations are not too inaccurate. But we are not told until later (pp.
217-18) why the establishment of a priori conditions for intuiting and
conceptualizing is impossible. Here Hamann returns to the one point
made in the review, challenging Kant to admit that sensibility and
understanding spring from a common root (the possibility admitted at
A15/B29): reason as language. He suggests that there is still "a
chemist's tree of Diana" that "... can bring to re-birth the dew of a
pure natural language". This reading is consistent with Hamann's
insistance throughout his writings that reason is logos or language, and
that instead of an investigation of forms of sensing and categories we
need a "grammar of reason, as of writing and its common elements,
which intermingle like the strings on the psaltery and yet sound
together" (to Jacobi, December 1, 1784).
Hamann arrives at this point after discussion of the three
"purifications" of philosophy. The first attempted to render reason
independent of all tradition and of all belief based on tradition. The
second "is even more transcendental" and attempts to free reason
from experience and its confidence in everyday induction, to locate
reason as that which is beyond all experience. Hamann contends that
this second purification did not take place at all, except in the limited
sense that in freeing reason from experience Kant made it into an
unknowable substratum. What is needed is a third purification, the
"empirical purism of language", "the only, the first and last instrument
and criterion of reason, with no other credentials but tradition and
usage" (p. 215). What takes place if we attempt this new purification?
First, on the negative side (and apparently against Kant) we will see
that emphasis upon synthesis (expressed in subject-predicate judge
ments employing the copula) betrays a predudice for mathematics as
the proper form of knowledge. Geometry possesses a certainty that
rests on a literal reading of the simplest sensible intuitions, expressed
in language depending upon the poetic license of allowing us to speak
of points and lines, which are physically impossible (pp. 215-16; to
Scheffner, February 11, 1785). Adopting this license as its own,
metaphysics distorts all signs and figures of speech derived from
empirical knowledge, creates empty abstract ideas, and "by this lear
ned mischief it works up straightforward language into such a sense
less, ruttish, unstable, indefinite something = X, that nothing is left but
a rushing wind, a magic shadow-play, at most, as the wise Helvetius
says, the talisman and rosary of a transcendental superstitious belief in
entia rationis, their empty skins and rubble heaps" (p. 216).6
Second, on the positive side, we are enjoined to recognize that our
whole ability to think depends upon language, that "... it needs no
deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language and its
heraldry over the seven holy functions of logical propositions and
inferences" (p. 216). This point is perhaps well taken; at least one now
has to consider it quite seriously. Whereas Kant can counter the first
consequence of the empirical purism of language by pointing out that
Hamann has misunderstood the regulative role assigned to reason in
Kant's account, this second charge cuts more deeply. For consider
that the so-called "clue" to solving the mystery of the nature and
256 ROBERT E. BUTTS
extent of the categories is the table of judgments, a list of grammatical

features of types of propositions. One way to view the table is to
construe it as derived empirically from the ways that we form sen
tences that express claims about the world. But there is in Kant's short
treatment of the starting point of his case for the categories no
discussion at all of the role of language. Suppose - what clearly could
-
have been hypothesized by Kant that our language were not one that
is subject/predicate in form. Would this give us a different table of
judgments (suggesting a different ontology)? If so, what happens to
the necessity and universality, the privileged uniqueness, of Kant's
(modified aristotelian) set of categories?
There is much to ponder in this move to what we might call the
Hamannian alternative languages objection. The objection selects an
important feature of the Kantian approach to epistemology. For Kant,
epistemic inputs are sense-contentful intuitions ordered in space and
time. Kant's space is one to which Euclidian geometry properly
applies. He tells us, however, that it is entirely possible that there
might be beings with different conditions of sensibility (A90
91/B123), conditions so different that what is sensed might not, for
example, "answer to the concept of cause and effect". Thus, although
Kant does not discuss the possibility of alternative languages or logics,
he does at least admit the possibility of alternative structures of
sensibility. More central to Kant's program than language is sen
sibility. Constraints on intuition are more basic than constraints on
modes of expression. All of this can be granted; Hamann has never
theless struck a vital nerve. For him, the pure natural language will
best express our knowledge of the world. For Kant, that language is
embedded in a deeper set of logical forms, which ultimately determine
the kinds of valid epistemic moves we can make.7
The table of judgments as the "clue" to the derivation of the
categories is thus also a clue to the reason why Kant does not discuss
language as the source of our fixed conceptual framework. He ap
parently construed the forms of judgment as a species-universal logi
cal grammar, as a grammar that must underwrite well-formed asser
tion and correct inferential structures in any language. However, the
forms of judgment are derived from an analysis of how we assert and
infer in a language (or languages), but the connection between usage
in the language and the derived forms of judgment is never spelled
out. Why not? I think that at least a large part of the answer is that for
Kant the paradigm example of human knowing (and reasoning) is
Newtonian physics (see footnote 7). It would not matter, therefore, if
we took the grammar of judgment to be a formalism of an artificial
language, rather than a grammar derived by means of description of
assertion and inference patterns in an actual language. Our contem
porary example of the Kantian procedure is the use of computer
models (formal languages) as models of actual cognitive processes.
The problem Kant sought to resolve is one of how the subjective and
idiosyncratic sensory contents of our experience get to be managed in
- or a
the service of making objective knowledge claims. That a logic
- for this purpose is no longer in dispute.
deep grammar is prerequisite
Of course it is altogether different for the northern Magus. To make
language the center of "rationality" is for Hamann literally to replace
space and time and the categories as pure a priori forms with sounds
and letters (inscriptions) as such forms. Thus time and its numerical
relations stem from the oldest language (as sound), music, together
with the palpable rhythm of the pulse and breathing, which provide
primal measurement images derived from the experience of one's own
body. The oldest writing was drawing and painting, and concerned
itself from the beginning with the economy of space and its limiting
and determination by means of shapes. Our understanding of space
and time, then, derives directly from the pervasive influences of sight
and hearing. Language is the primal form of expression of these
"primitive" vocabularies of sight and sound, and thus constitutes the
common root of sensibility and understanding. And if reason is lan
reason is now seen as that common root: reason as
guage, language;
not reason as systematic regulation. The literal features expressive of
primal "sensibility", not the copula (not synthesis), become the source
of human understanding. We cannot analyze without introducing
distorting abstractions; we cannot synthesize without introduction of
the artificial logical copula. Analysis should play no role in human
understanding; logical synthesis must be replaced by community,
which is "the true principle of reason and language, through which
our sense-experiences and concentrations are modified" (to Jacobi,
April 30, 1787),8 Kant's theory of knowledge invites us to calculate on
the chalk-board and to investigate in the laboratory; Hamann's invites
us to join the faithful in church.
258 ROBERT E. BUTTS
3.
I have endeavored to present Hamann's metacriticism of what he

called Kant's "metagrobolizing" of transcendental philosophy sym
pathetically, in order to suggest lines of genuine philosophical chal
lenge. For Hamann, language is a sacrament. What is it for Kant?
With reference only to fundamentals, Hamann raises two questions for
Kant to answer.9 If I am wrong about the nature and function of
language, which is the correct view? If I am wrong about the nature
and function of reason, which is the correct view? We know that Kant
says very little explicitly about language, and that he wrote thousands
of words on the topic of reason. I will not delay matters by entering
into detailed discussion of what Kant says quite informally in scattered
places about language,10 but will concentrate on the several places
where he analyzes symbolic cognition, a topic that is obviously very
close to central features of Hamann's program. I need to work up to
this analysis by easy steps, starting with a review of some basic and
familiar features of Kant's epistemology, especially as they bear on
questions of semantics. After all, Hamann's suggestion is that one can
read the written record of God's revelation correctly only through the
eyes of faith: a hidden semantics is disclosed when one possesses an
essentially gnostic secret. If we are to understand Kant's probable
reply to Hamann, it is to questions of meaning that we must turn. And
if we can get our bearings correctly aligned, the question of the role of
reason in human knowing will be seen to look after itself.
In his various discussions of meaning, Kant deals with the semantics
of concepts, not with the semantics of words. There are good reasons
for this emphasis. First, intuitive cognition for Kant is cognition that is
always in direct referential connection with its (sense-given) content,
and the words we use to signify this connection are chosen arbitrarily.
Similarly, in the case of discursive cognition (by means of concepts),
the sign accompanies the concept "only as a watchman in order to
produce the concept when an occasion arises" (Anthro, p. 191). Kant
is only incidentally studying a special subclass of word usages; more
important, he is studying those deep grammatical invariant forms
routinely employed in making knowledge claims. The language used
to express such claims is differential; the logical form is (hopefully)
invariant. This in large part accounts for his starting point, one that so
disturbed Hamann: the table of judgments. If all of this is presup
posed, we can now ask "how, then, would Kant have answered the
question: 'how is it that concepts take on meaning, possess what he
calls 'content'?'". An outline of the answer is the following:
(1) Concepts of the understanding (categories: substance,

cause/effect) derive their meaning through provision of an
a priori semantics by means of a procedure called pure
schematization. Schematization provides rules of meaning
for all categories (A142-47/B181-87).
(2) Empirical concepts (trilobite, interlaced double herringbone
stitch) derive their meaning through provision of a prag
matically based semantics that yields empirical schematiza
tion rules (A141-42/B179-81).
(3) Mathematical concepts (7 + 5, the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line) derive their meaning from
constructions in a priori intuition: the content of a mathe
matical concept is an idealization of constructive pro
cedures (Trans. Aesthetic; A713-31/B741-59).
(4) Physical concepts (motion: direction of motion, quantity of
motion) derive their meaning from constructions (in the
mathematical sense of exhibition of meaning in a priori
intuition) that provide applications of mathematical prin
ciples to contexts of matter in motion. For example, the
science of physics requires that motions be additive, and
that all physical quantities be subject to procedures of
iteration (MAN 6: 470;27: 487).
(5) Concepts of feeling (felt resistance, fatigue) derive their
meaning from behavioristically shared discourse (appeal to
the sensus communis) about bits of subjective knowledge
by acquaintance (MAN 59: 510; KU 293-96).
I am prepared to argue that so far as adequacy in dealing with
epistemic possibilities is concerned, these are for Kant the only
available semantical formats. Provision is made for both the sense and
the reference of terms conceptualized in each of the five ways.
Hamann has dismissed mathematical and physical concepts [(3) and
(4)] as abstract distortions of what we find in sensibility (in his sense of
I suppose his final verdict on mathematical -
Empfindung). physics
given that mathematics is only entitled to certainty through exercise of
- is that it
"poetic license" is a complex and existentially perverse
260 ROBERT E. BUTTS
word-game. He has also dismissed the system of the categories [(1)] as

one based on a logical connective arbitrarily fixed on all synthetic
thought. So suppose we give him a temporary benefit of the doubt on
the reliability of the semantics for concepts of types (1), (3), and (4),
and look more closely at what Kant suggests regarding empirical
concepts in his specialized sense of the term [(2)], and regarding those
empirical concepts signifying feelings [(5)].
First, however, notice the kinds of cognitive reports whose pur
ported contents lack a semantics. He calls some of them "Ideas" or
"Ideas or reason".11 If these mental markers had a reference (they do
have a very special sense as rules of method), they would pick out
items in principle always unavailable to experience: they would refer
to supersensibles, "objects" transcending experience. But there is
no knowable God, or immortal soul. So concepts or mental markers
that take on semantical significance must always for Kant refer to
knowables .The criterion of or
meaningfulness cognitive significance
for Kant is epistemological, not ontological: to be meaningful is to be
knowable (not, notice: to be is to be knowable). Kant thought that
objects can exist (God) and not be knowable. That something can
exist does not depend upon what we can know of it. (There are
difficulties here that lead some of us to conclude that Kant's ontology
must be one limited to bodies occupying and moving about in space
through time, but that is a disputed matter, and one not decidable
-
here.) So it follows that a large class of Hammanian "objects" God,
of gnostic source - are not knowables
the objects of secret messages
for Kant. Again, the Kant/Hamann division on questions of the status
and role of reason is absolute and total.
It would seem that what I have called 'concepts of feeling' [(5)]
come closest to Hamann's linguistic expressions of Empfindungen. But
this is not the case. I exclude here the feeling associated with ap
preciation of works of art, because this is not, strictly speaking,
conceptualizable at all for Kant. Aesthetic appreciation involves a
universalizable feeling that is not conceptualizable, but involves a
judgment of taste. That, for Kant, is another story; he certainly does
not locate the "aesthetic" in this sense within the contents of direct
sensory intuition, because objects of aesthetic appreciation are also
not, strictly speaking, in space and time. The concepts of feeling I have
in mind are the concepts of motion and force. Kant insists throughout
his writings on matter theory and related topics that motion and force
are empirically discovered. And what he has in mind is rather special,

and is often neglected or simply missed out completely by his com
mentators. We learn about motion by moving about in space; it is the
"organic" orientation of our body as object directed at and
pragmatic
away from other such objects that yields the concept of motion. One
"feels" motion as actual bodily transport, and as felt resistance.
the only forces we are entitled to postulate are those
Similarly,
introduced to explain felt resistance to bodily efforts to overcome
common obstacles (lifting a heavy object, attempting to throw a ball a
long distance), and the resulting felt exhilaration or felt fatigue. There
is, then, a kind of brute matter-of-factness involved in the referents of
the concepts of motion and force. What we have to deal with here is a
very specialized semantics for the concepts of motion and force (there
are no others to which Kant gives this special status). But does not
Hamann's language of sensibility and emotion countenance just such
concepts of feeling? Is there not at this point something of a shared
semantical base from which agreement might be attained? I think not.
The reason is not far to seek. Kant insists upon discourse whose
meanings can be publicly shared through discussion and debate. The

essence of enlightment may be to take responsibility for one's own
thinking, but often accepting this responsibility requires an effort to
"take the point of view of the other". Kantian feelings are not private
and ineffable; they have a private or subjective aspect; but, unless
they can be publicly shared, they cannot serve as signs with com
municative significance. And so we must look into what Kant and
Hamann have to about the sensus communis, a curious notion
say
much discussed in 18th century Germany.
4.
Kant provides us with a clear and definite concept of the sensus

communis; Hamann does not. At the beginning of MPRV he tells us
that what Hume regarded as one of the "most valuable discoveries
-
made in our time in the republic of letters" (p. 213 Berkeley's view
are -
that universals representing particulars "lies open and exposed
without any particular profundity, in the mere linguistic usage of the
meanest perception and observation of the sensus communis". Else
where (to Jacobi, December 1, 1784), we find him referring to the
In these
"commonest figures of speech of the sensus communis".
262 ROBERT E. BUTTS
places Hamann appears to be using the term to refer to a "common

sense" in the form of a shared ordinary language. This language, as we
have seen, is only to be trusted when it is "purified", when by
acceptance of divine instruction we can use this language to translate
God's revelations. In this way the "common sense" usages of language
become a that "... transforms our best wise-acres into senseless
"key"
mystics, and the simplest Galileans and fishermen into the profoundest
students and heralds of a wisdom which is not of earth, or of man, or
of the devil, but a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God
-
ordained before the ages for our glory which none of the rulers of
- I -
this world can understand Cor. 2 and this philosophy leaves no
proper man, who has been driven by fear into desert places and
wilderness, without help and comfort" (to Jacobi, November 2, 1783).
In a later letter to Jacobi (April 30, 1787), Hamann makes this point
somewhat less poetically (but remember: for Hamann poetry is the
first and truest language of man) by suggesting that the true principle
of reason and language is community. Every one, he contends, seeks
to analyze the ideas of others, and to synthesize his own ideas, and
from this (failure to communicate?) results an inconstant and per
petually changing ordinary language.
Is the sensus communis as a of users then
community language
simply what we have always taken it to be: a socially perpetuated and

to communicate syn
ever-continuing experimental attempt private
thesis across public analysis to remote (other person) private syn
thesis? No, this is not Hamann's view. What unites speakers in
community is not an attempt to share ordinary language meanings in
use - to translate private - but the
synthesis into public synthesis
Word. "It is the Word which turns fellow-sinners into brothers of one
mind_" Remember Hamann's dark saying: "What is the common
way of word usage? Witnesses" (to Jacobi, April 27, 1787). We face
another deliberate Hamannian ambiguity. If we take Hamann at his
-
word and that word is disturbing in its implications for epistemology
- in a double sense. Words
then faith is required give testimony of
events that have taken place, feelings felt, and the like. To com
municate is for you to accept on faith that my word captures
adequately that which it stands for. Why on faith? Because you cannot
directly share my Empfindungen: they are private and ineffable; their
immediacy transcends all public access. To accept my words is thus to
accept an implicit appeal to authority; in the reporting of my
experiences only I am authoritative. When I speak I solicit your faith

in me. But your faith in me is only appropriate (remember that the
word usages in the sensus communis only provide a "key") if we share
the deeper community of faith in God as the Word; the appeal is
ultimately to the higher authority of God himself.
If I understand these perplexing matters at all, it seems to me that
ordinary language must be viewed as having a double semantics. The
first level of ordinary language meaning is accepted usage. If we stay
at this level of language we are at least close to the direct contents of
our sensory experiences. It is for this reason, I think, that Hamann felt
so close to the British empiricists, especially Berkeley and Hume, and
to Edward Young.12 The point seems to be that by remaining close to
meaning in use we will be able to prevent the distorting abstractions of
the school philosophers, and to block the existentially mischievous
move to mathematics as the paradigm form of rationally managed
knowing. Thus the "key" provided by ordinary language word use is
one that "unlocks" the abstractions of philosophy and science, open
ing the "door" to the wealth of direct sensory contents of experience.
With that door now open, the true semantics of human language is
seen to be a set of meanings contained in the gnostic sharing of the
revealed contents of faith (the "secret and hidden wisdom of God").
Genuine linguistic meanings are thus purifications of usage in the
sensus communis, now understood as creations of "things of faith",
and poetic expression is the only form of access to such "meanings".
Moreover, the semantics of the purified ordinary language is ineffable,
meaning that it no longer ties itself to common word usage, but
"translates" this language into sensuously present objects that are
hidden from public view.
Hamann's view of the sensus communis is thus one that requires us
to see that genuine human community is a relationship of the faithful,
and in this community the referent of all language is the humanly
indescribable Word of God. All that language - at the deeper level of
semantics - can do is "present" that Word in new "objects". The new
objects are themselves creations of the faithful poet; they "stand for"
elements of the Word as Symbols, humanly created analogues of the
"unseen things of faith". It seems to me to follow that for Hamann all
genuinely expressive human language is symbolic, where the symbol is
an analogy for some aspect of the revelation, and is a sensuously
intuited direct content of "purified" experience.13 There is here an
264 ROBERT E. BUTTS
appeal to a sensuous emblem whose referent is supernatural and

supersensible. Wewould expect that Kant will have something to say
about all of this, and we will not be disappointed. But I am anticipat
ing matters requiring careful presentation. I must first discuss what
Kant has to say about the sensus communis.
Unlike Hamann, Kant has a fairly simple and quite precise concept
of the sensus communis. He employs the term frequently, providing
the most careful definition in the third Critique:
By the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense; that is, a
critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of
representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgement with the
collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and
personal conditions which could readily be taken as objective, an illusion that would
exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgement. (KU, p. 293)l4
In this place there follows a discussion of taste as a public sense, but

there is a much more important general application of this Kantian
idea of attempting to achieve consensus. What he wants (p. 295) is
access to the possibility of universal communicability of subjective
contents of my experience, and the need for this possibility is felt in
our attempted avoidance of prejudice and superstition (p. 294). In
other places he will enlarge the list of that which is to be avoided,
including entranced clericalism, appeals to gnostic insight, forms of
extra-sensory perception, and enthusiasm (Schw?rmerei) (Butts 1984).
The process to be invoked is one of weighing our judgment against
possible judgments of others by putting ourselves, so to speak, in the
position of everyone else. We must, then, minimize the influence of
the most direct content of our own experiences, sensation, and attend
to the formal question of whether what we think we know can be valid
for all human reason. This attempted universalization here seeks
universal consensus in its merely formal aspect; Kant is not suggesting
that we undertake the empirical investigation of what in fact others
think to be true in the same instance. It is not a question of what I can
in fact discover about the judgments of others, but of what I can
discover about my own entitlement to take what I believe to be valid
for all others.
In the first Critique Kant had already discussed this "touchstone"
(without introducing the term 'sensus communis') in an effort to
distinguish between conviction and persuasion. I am entitled to be
convinced when my
hypothesized judgment, as a content of my mind
requiring subjective causes, is valid for every rational agent. If my

judgment has nothing else but reference to some one or more of my
special characteristics, it is mere persuasion. Kant's analysis proceeds
from this point into fairly complex technicalities having to do with
determining the characteristics of the three grades of conviction:
opining, believing, and knowing (Butts 1984, Chap. VIII). For
present purposes Kant's general point will have to suffice. That point
is that I am not entitled to make assertions of the truth of my
judgments unless I can be sure that these are in principle necessarily
valid for everyone. I may think I have good objective grounds for
some given assertion, but I can never be sure of these grounds until I
can specify as well the subjective causes of the judgment. Thus Imust
have a means for moving from merely private validity to objective
validity, which means that I must have a means for moving from
features of internal subjective constraint or disability of character to
external features of objects. We are back to the "touchstone" of the
common sense;
The touchstone whereby we decide whether our holding a thing to be true is conviction
or mere persuasion is therefore external, namely, the possibility of communicating it and
of finding it to be valid for all human reason. (A820/B848)
If my conditional assertion is regarded as merely an appearance in my

mind, I have no way of subjectively distinguishing between persuasion
and conviction. There are no subjective determinations of truth, or
even of assertability.15 However, in the absence of such deter
minations, I do have a subjective test of my judgment: the test of
universalizability on the assumption of common rationality.
For there is... at least a presumption that the ground of agreement of all judgements
with each other, notwithstanding the differing characters of individuals, rests upon the
common ground, namely, the object, and that it is for this reason that they are all in
-
agreement with the object the truth of the judgement being thereby proved.
(A820/B848)
Assuming then that we all do seek to rest the assertability of our

judgments on features of the objects judged, rather than on our own
idiosyncratic characters, we test the assertability of any given judg
ment by asking if it can be valid for all rational beings. If the decision
is negative, I have learned that my judgment has only private validity,
and is a persuasion. If the decision is positive, I have learned only that
266 ROBERT E. BUTTS
my judgment has more than private validity; that is, I now have reason
to think that the judgment does not rest of prejudice, superstition, or a
deranged mind. The principal test effected by appeal to the common
sense is achievement of a decision regarding whether my subjective
appeal is merely subjective, or can at least as a matter of rational
principle be taken to be about objective features of the world.
Kant's suggested role for the sensus communis is thus one of
providing assurance of satisfaction of formal conditions of assertability
or communicability. Conviction is not a result of satisfaction of these
conditions alone. I can only be entitled to conviction in those cases
whereas my putative objective grounds turn out to be the actual
subjective causes of my conditional beliefs. I can be deceived even
when the result of the universalizability test is positive. Structures of
rational form are present in much maladaptive mental behavior. I may
be "mad with reason". So finally, the machinery of objectification
given in the a priori principles of the understanding must be present in
genuine cases of knowing. But the postulated common sense as public
sense has done its work in the sense that at least it directs me to
suspect that there must be a common ground sustaining something
like genuine communication amongst rational beings.
This feature of publicity is one Kant returns to in Anthropologie at
the place where he offers his nosology of mental derangements (pp.
219-20; Butts 1984, Central Nervous System). He states that the only
general characteristic of madness is the individual's loss of "common
sense" (Gemeinsinn; sensus communis), and replacement by "natural
obstinacy" (logische Eigensinn; sensus privalus). There is again the
reference to the "touchstone": it is a subjective necessity that we seek
to relate our private understanding to that of others, and not just to
isolate ourselves within our own private representations. Subsequently,
Kant will sketch a theory of the development of mental derangements,
which shows that they are dependent upon reinforcement of genetic
ally acquired tendencies, where the reinforcement starts by withdrawal
from the "other" world, the world of objects in space, the epistemic
matrix and exemplar of all publicity. Derangement as "logical" or
"natural" thus has a suggested theoretical context. But we need not go
into further details of Kant's intriguing remarks on mental health and
mental illness. Here it is the extraordinary stress upon the importance
of the public context of communicability of otherwise private
representations that needs comparison with Hamann's gnostic appeal
to the importance of the sensus communis.16
I hope that my account of the two men's uses of this remarkable

concept has provided enough material to make the apparent contrast
into a really sharp one. Hamann's purified (informed by faith) common
sense language becomes the poetry expressive of God's meanings.
These meanings are literally gnostic - hidden secrets, available only to
those who are committed members of the church of Christ. "Faith",
he writes to Jacobi (on April 30, 1787), "is not everyone's thing, nor is
it communicable like merchandise; it is the kingdom of heaven and
hell within us". On the other side, Kant, the arch-enemy of gnosti
cism, seeks in the common sense an experimental context for est
ablishing the formal conditions of communicability on the assumption
that private representations can be publicly shared.17 For Kant objects
are items to be described and known by means of concepts available
-
to all. Without the assumption of a rational basis for communication
we all suppose that what we talk about are reals of one sort or another
- there is no
epistemic stability: we cannot distinguish conviction from
persuasion, knowledge from error, dreaming from being awake, sanity
from madness. For Hamann there is ultimately only one object, God,
"knowable" only through faith, ineffable, unscathed by Kant's
attempted demotion of the divine object to the status of a mere focus
imaginarius. Kant seeks community and consensus and public
experimentation; Hamann seeks communion and consent and the
literal crucial experiment: the test of the Cross.
5.
Return, then, to the second class of concepts, empirical concepts, and

their semantics: (2) above. The semantics of empirical concepts is
provided by a process Kant calls "schematization" (A137-47/B176
87; Butts 1984, pp. 151-68). Briefly, the schemata of empirical
concepts are semantical rules fitting such concepts to instances
amongst those items available to direct sensation. The referents of
empirical concepts are observables, items whose presence or absence
to human observers can only be noted by the sensory presence of
certain marks characreristic of things located in space. The semantical
content (schema) of an empirical concept can be thought of as a list of
marks whose presence or absence exemplifies or fails to exemplify that
concept. For example, the concept 'trilobite' can be schematized by
the following list:
268 ROBERT E. BUTTS
(1) If this x is a trilobite then its identifiable features will

confirm that it is a fossil remnant.
(2) If this x is a trilobite then its body will display a three-part
structure.
(3) If this x is a trilobite then the results of carbon dating will

yield the observation that its geological matrix is roughly
2,500,000 years old.
The list will of course be much more extensive; but what is required
for a correct semantics of an empirical concept is that some such list,
however long, will give the meaning of the term chosen to stand for
the concept. Observable satisfaction of enough of the exemplification
features will determine whether or not we are in the presence of what
we have chosen to call 'trilobite'.
It will be noted that many of the observables picked out by the
consequents of such semantics-bearing conditionals are themselves
derived from theory. The results of carbon dating, for example, cannot
be understood except in the context of a great deal of physical theory,
and even the determination that something is a fossil remnant (not just
a "found thing") is theory-laden. This admission does not introduce
problems for Kant, whose standard view is that all sense intuitions are
in various respects theory-laden (the categories providing the master
theory to whose demands all conceptualization of the empirically
given must remain faithful). All that is required is that whatever
theory provides as observables (and this is true even if our observables
are merely operationally defined, as Kant sometimes suggests that they
are) must enable us to pick out exemplifications. Any language or
conceptualization scheme whose terms or concepts lack instances or
examples revealed as sensory marks or observables is one in which we
do not know what we are talking about or thinking about. The
schemata are then meaning rules, rules for the selection of reliable
referential instances of those observables that permit application of
words to meanings or concepts to objects.
It is interesting to ask ourselves about those words that apparently
express empirical concepts but which on Kant's account cannot be
schematized, which lack an empirical or referential semantics. Among
the words such semantical reference are 'soul', 'in
lacking 'spirit',
stantaneous communication of thought across space', and whatever
words we use to report the images of our dreams. Consider first that
we can very easily associate images with each of these words. What
Kant wants is for the images to do the work of instancing the apparent
concept named by the word. But my image of 'spirit', whenever itmay
be, does not serve to direct me to observable features of the
space/time world; the image is especially impoverished in its role of
conveying location in space to users of the word. In some writings (see
Butts 1984, pp. 158-68) Kant employs the schematization process as a
heuristic test of the possible empirical meaningfulness of certain
putative concepts. If we cannot determine beforehand what sensible
marks will apply a concept, or cannot even determine beforehand
what possible relations might obtain between the special associated
image and possible empirical instances, we are dealing with an
empirically empty concept. This last point is important. If I cannot
even determine the possible relationship between, say, my dream
image of flying through space, and actual cases of space-located free
motion, then there is no sense in which the dream image is even
expressible in publicly communicable empirical concept language.
Thus to say, as Kant implies, that dream images lack an empirical
semantics, or that the images of extra-sensory perception lack an
empirical semantics (which is the same as to say that they cannot be
schematized), is equivalent to holding that whatever "meaning" these
images convey is literally gnostic and private. The only legitimate
epistemic and communicative role for an image is schematization.
How does this theory of empirical semantics apply to Hamann's
views on language? The following passages from his Aesthetica in
Nuce are representative of those aspects of his theory of language now
needing to be considered:
Poetry is the mother-tongue ofthe human race, as the garden is older than the field,
painting than writing, songs that declamation, parables than inferences, barter than
commerce. The rest of our forebears was a deeper sleep; and their movement was a
tumultuous dance. Seven days they sat in the silence of reflection or astonishment; and
opened their mouths to utter winged words. Senses and passions speak and understand
nothing but images. The whole treasure of human knowledge and happiness consists of
nothing but images. The first outburst of creation, and the first impression of its
historian, the first appearance and the first enjoyment of nature, are united in the words.
Let there be light. Herewith begins the experience of the presence of things, (p. 196)
- of angels into a language of men, that is,
Speech is translation from the language
thoughts into words, things into names, images into signs, which can be poetical or
270 ROBERT E. BUTTS
kyriological, historical or symbolical or hieroglyphical, philosophical or characteristic.

This kind of translation (that is, speech) is, more than any other, like the underside of a
carpet,
And shows the stuff, but not the workman's skill;
or like an eclipse of the sun, which can be seen in a bowl of water.... (pp. 197-98)
I will not repeat discussion of the features of Hamann's views on

language that touch most clearly
quoted on the passages. That
Hamann, like Kant, put crucial emphasis upon the role of images is
apparent here. Apparent also is the fact that both of them are reading
the significance of that role in vastly different terms. For Kant the
image is the collection of exemplifying features by virtue of which we
apply an empirical concept correctly. For Hamann the image is the
vessel of inner meanings made possible when the language of common
sense is purified; it is the poetical symbol, opaque to common sense
and to philosophical abstraction, but both a direct sensory presen
tation and a "translation" of the content of faith for those who have
received the secret message through the passion of Christian
engagement.1* We have seen something of the role played by such
symbolic presentation and representation in the thought of Hamann.
The challenge offered to Kant is one of producing a suitable "critical"
analysis of this alternative view of the nature and role of images
symbolically expressed.
6.
What we find is that Kant

preoccupied was
with what he called
"symbolic cognition" throughout all stages of his philosophical career.
His views on this form of cognition begin to take form in his in
vestigation of Swedenborg's pretensions on behalf of clairvoyance and
communication with spirits in Dreams of a Spiritseer (1766). One of
the fundamental themes
Swedenborg's ofspiritualism (AK II, pp.
363-64) is that material
objects, including human bodies, have no
independent subsistence, but depend ultimately upon powers emanat
ing from the world of spirits: it is the totality of the power of all spirits
that sustains each material body. This view implies that our knowledge
of material objects is of two kinds, the ordinary knowledge we have of
external relations between objects, and special knowledge of what
material objects express about the spiritual world that forms the true
THE Ci RAMM AR OF REASON 271
causal basis of all existence. Ordinary knowledge of material objects is

of small importance; what really counts is the symbolic expression of
spiritual realities that is associated with each body. Each body, and
each manifestation of behaviour of that body - human speech and
writing, for example - has an inner meaning only available to those
like Swedenborg whose inner life has been opened up by faith. (The
parallels with Hamann are so obvious throughout all of this that I will
not bore readers by noting them in detail.) It is this feature of the
symbolic that requires, in addition, new interpretations of Scripture,
interpretations offered by Swedenborg in his preposterous Celestial
Arcana. Both physical objects and human words are symbolic of inner
spiritual states.
As we know, in Tr?ume Kant shows great reluctance to take
seriously the claim that such interpretations of symbols can themselves
count as anything more than either dreams or mental derangements.
What is symbolic of inner and hidden and not universally accessible
meanings puts too heavy a metaphysical burden on those who do not
de facto find themselves to be members of two worlds: one spiritual,
and one material. As always (but here for the first time in his writings)
Kant looks for a point of public access, and finds it in a primitive
concept of spatial location of the body, and what is given to that body
with common experience, -
in sensation. Conformably he accepts and
-
I think in dead earnest that I am where I sense: "Wo ich empfinde,
da bin ich" (p. 324).19 This ontology is allied with Kant's conclusion
that even if alleged manifestations of the spirit world are expressed
symbolically in a clear and intuitive way, such representations will
never be adequate to make him accept them as true disclosures of the
existence of spirits and spiritual forces. Even "... the representation of
the self, the soul as a can never become a of
spirit,... concept
experience or a sensible intuition for the human mind" (p. 338).

These themes will take on paramount importance in the later
development of the critical philosophy, as will one more basic theme
adumbrated in the discussion of Swedenborg: the close relationship
between symbols and ideas of reason. Kant states that the closest
relatives of spiritual ideas are ideas of reason. He does not here claim
-
what will later underwrite the program of the critical philosophy that
ideas of reason are contentless, incapable of being instanced by any
entities at all - but only that such ideas are so difficult for human
beings to comprehend that they use metaphors to express them (p.
272 ROBERT E. BUTTS
339). We represent God as angry and vengeful, just as poets personify

virtues and vices, and geometricians represent time as a straight line,
and some philosophers speak of the enternity of God as an apparent
infinity of time. The best that can be claimed for such expressions is
that they may be morally uplifting if the analogies are apt. Later, in
the first and second Critiques, and in Religion within the Bounds of
Reason Alone, Kant will warn against efforts to make the symbol into
the thing, and to fill empty ideas of reason thereby with surreptitious
contents. To make the ceremony with its images and musical symbols
into the object of faith is to replace rational faith with superstition and
possibly with fanaticism, and to sacrifice sound judgment in religion to
the professional clerics.20
We learn two basic things about Kant's attitude toward symbolic
cognition from this early and wrongfully despised little book on
Swedenborg. First, the symbol, seen as a request for interpretation, is a
weak and possibly distorting conveyor of meaning. It is no epistemic
substitute for what is directly given in immediate sensation. Because it
requires interpretation, that which it represents or presents is a realm
whose very entitlement to ontological status is in question. Kant is not
questioning the various non-epistemic roles that can be usefully played
by symbolic cognition. But if we are to account for the possibility of
genuine knowing, we should begin, not with a questionable symbol
system requiring gnostic hermeneutic tools for interpretation, but with
what we are as human beings whose sensuous intuitions arise through
receptivity of something given: properties of objects related to one
another in space.
The second thing we learn is that metaphors used to express hidden

inner lives are just like metaphors used to express difficult to com
prehend (later: because empty of schematic meaning) ideas of reason.
Just as bodies and words symbolize by analogy the largely inaccessible
world of spirits, so do verbal and ceremonial stand-ins for reasons
symbolize God and immortality. At the very least, then, we should be
on our guard when confronted with symbols that invite us to transcend
the limits of the humanly knowable: to hypostatize the ideas of reason
and the images of the dreamer is to destroy the prospects of good
epistemology and the hope of universal mental health. If we substitute
Hamann for Swedenborg in this early exercise of Kant, there seems to
be little difference. Hamann was not a committed spiritualist, but like
Swedenborg he sought establishment of a special church. Like
Swedenborg he sought also a new interpretation of the Bible. Like

Swedenborg he trusted symbols whose origins were in the far-away
reaches of his own inwardness. I think Kant would have said that like
Swedenborg the symptoms of his quasi-philosophical dream states are
indistinguishable from those of one who ismentally ill. So, remove the
special trappings from the book, substitute 'Hamann' for each occur
rence of 'Swedenborg', and the tale Kant tells comes out just the
same/1
However, Kant goes far beyond the hints and teases of Tr?ume, and
in both the third Critique and the Anthropologie provides a new
analysis of the differences between schematic meaning and symbolic
meaning.221 will confine my exposition to the analysis given in Critique
of Judgement (Part I, Section 59).23 There are some slight changes in
the older distinctions. After insisting that intuitions are always
required in order to verify the referential content of our concepts,
Kant tells us that if the concepts are empirical, the intuitions supply
examples; if the concepts are pure concepts of the understanding the
intuitions are called schemata. This is a minor change. In the Schema
tism passage in the first Critique Kant was prepared to allow both
empirical and pure schematization (A141-42/B180-81). The earlier
account is more exacting; Kant does not want the referential content
of empirical concepts to be literal images, but examples complying
with the schematization rules. The rules specify what it is to count as
an example.24 In this new rendering, however, Kant wants to bring out
the cardinal consideration that ideas of reason cannot have the
verification of reference available to concepts. No intuition is adequate
to instance an idea of reason.
If we are to understand how to portray representations clearly, we

must have a short lesson in rhetoric. Kant tells us that all hypotyposis
(Darstellung, subjectio sub adspectum), ("representation that exhibits
meaning with sensuous clarity" seems to hit the mark) is of two kinds.
It is either schematic, based on intuitions given a priori, or it is
symbolic, representing a thinkable idea to which no sensuous intuition
can be adequate. In the second case, the symbol provides an analogue
of a schema, and nothing more. That which "agrees with" (quasi-in
stances) the concept is a rule for introducing this symbol as an analogy
of a proper semantical rule, and is not an intuition, a sensible example.
Thus intuition as a mode of representation is itself either schematic or
symbolic. Schemata and symbols are not mere marks (inscriptions),
274 ROBERT E. BUTTS
whose sole function is to allow us to reinvoke a given concept by

remembering it.Marks, as words or visible signs, express concepts, but
they have no intrinsic connections with the objects thus marked.
Both schemata and symbols, then, exhibit representations, and in so
doing provide rules for linking the representation to a content. Sche
mata represent concepts directly, symbols do so indirectly. Schemata
represent demonstrably, in that we can actually employ the rules they
enjoin to pick out sensible examples, observables. They function as
referential rules. Symbols effect connection with sensible contents only
by analogy. Analogy as representation or presentation of meanings is a
complex two-sided procedure. First, an analogy applies a concept to
an object of sensuous intuition; second, it estimates (renders judgment
upon) that object by means of a rule that applies the intuition to
another object, of which the first is the symbol. For example, we
represent a monarchical state as a living body. Living body is here
applied to an instance of an empirically observed entity, monarchical
state, where this state is estimated to be (construed as) a state
governed by constitutional laws. The representation, living body, thus
applies directly to a body that lives, and indirectly to a monarchical
state. It applies by schematization to a mortal body, by symbolization,
to a monarchical state. Its direct application follows a proper referen
tial rule; its indirect application follows an idiosyncratic (merely sub
jective) rule that in the given case a state is to be taken to be a
socio-political form of constitutional government. We can, however,
also symbolize such a state as a mere machine (like a hand-mill), when
we take it to be like an object governed by an individual absolute will.
Kant next tells us that the representational function involved in
symbolization has been little noted, and is worthy of deeper study,
which he will not now pause to enter into. But a rather deep and
important feature of sensuous representation or exhibition has been
disclosed. For, whereas there is no direct empirical similarity between
a despotic state and a hand-mill (to stay with the second example),
there is, he says, "perhaps" a similarity between the rules on the basis
of which we estimate what it is to be a despotic state and a hand-mill,
and this similarity between estimation (judgment) rules may disclose
similarities in the kind of causality that brings about both objects.
What Kant has in mind, of course, is that we will in the present case
come to understand both despotic states and machines better if we
estimate ("beurteilen") them to be designed objects, objects put into
being for a purpose. Proper cognition that can provide knowledge is

only possible through schematization, through provision of a seman
tics that permits us to apply concepts to sensuous instances directly.
Symbolic cognition, to the contrary, can only give us knowledge of the
supersensible (in this case, of God) through provision of apt analogies.
It is because we introduce the methodological rule permitting study of
nature as designed that we symbolically know God as designer - and
this on analogy with actual cases of empirical purposive design:
human beings making objects by work directed to realizing introduced
and therefore chosen ends.
- and
Finally this after all is the point of the section of the third
Critique we have been studying - Kant suggests that his analysis of
symbolic cognition permits us to say that the beautiful is the symbol of
the morally good. Here the analogy points back to what we have
learned about the sensus communis. The beautiful pleases immediately
and apart from all interest. Our free estimate of the beautiful
represents our judgment as one in accord with the
understanding's
conformity to law. Our subjective estimate of the beautiful, although it
does not apply a concept, is nevertheless represented as universal, as
valid for all human persons. It is the rule of rendering subjective
-
maxims universal in the case of aesthetic experience submitting
judgments of taste to the test of the sensus communis; in the case of
moral motives submitting personal maxims to the test of practical
rational universalizability - that
yields the good analogy between the
beauty of an object and the moral worth of a motive. This is true even
though beauty is pleasing and moral good is a duty, and thus have
nothing in common. What the analogy enables us to do is to see the
importance of appeals to universalizability. One such appeal is cate
gorical and transforms a maxim into an imperative. The other is
teleological and transforms a subjective pleasure into a matter of
public taste.25
7.
What remains is to apply this enriched analysis of symbolic cognition

to Hamann's rather extravagant claims for the symbol, for poetry, as
both the source and the purified result of human faith. In full effect,
this remnant has already been dealt with. What we have in the case of
Humann and Kant is a classic example of two worlds that cannot
276 ROBERT E. BUTTS
meet. Hermeneutics and philosophical analysis are just such worlds

apart from one another. Hamann sought an inward assurance of
meanings that would translate human symbols into the hidden lan
guage of the angels. Success in this is only possible if one has some
access to the angels. The semantics of Hamann's purified language is
thus to be found in the sounds of the voices of those angels, translating
as they are the logos, reason, the message of God. For Hamann the
grammar of reason is the grammar of angelic singing. Kant sought an
external context for meanings, a context of sensibility, of the data
inputs of sense. The semantics of that context is in full accord with a
fixed logic and a fixed categorial conceptual framework. The symbol
- one
(in the case we have studied) stands not for two meanings
to sense and one secret - a two
apparent but for relationship between
patterns of causally operative design. To suppose that the symbol
could stand for anything more is to take the symbolic expression, like
any of the ideas of reason, to stand for something ascertainable by
gnostic vision, by "intellectual intuition", by dreams and the ghosts of
a deranged mind. For Hamann the grammar of reason is the grammar
of angelic singing. For Kant, the grammar of reason is logic as the
deep grammar of our human conceptualizing, a logic that perpetuates
attempts to universalize: in science, in matters of taste, in morally
action, in efforts to communicate.
worthy
Hamann's metacriticism of
the critical philosophy invited Kant to
take language seriously. I hope we have seen that Kant did indeed
take language seriously. So seriously, indeed, that it was part of his
life-long quest to make sure that the account of what we can reliably
know takes full and significant measure of man's public presence, both
to himself and to others. Kant talked about concepts rather than about
words, but the emphasis is not all that important. What is important is
that questions of meaning also make contact with public sense, with
what we are as bodies in a shared spatial world. The symbolic, the
metaphorical, the expressive analogy, can do no more than entertain
and inspire, or, at the very best, to invite attention to new
methodological strategies. In none of this do we find ready and
fulfilled access to the supersensible. God exists only on the other
extreme of the analogy based on research strategies evoked by obser
ved design. The Logos exists in no other place than in the expectation
that we can in principle obtain universal assent to what we as private
individuals hold to be true. This way, thought Kant, points to enligh
tenment, freedom from self-incurred tutelage. It is Kant's critical

philosophy itself that answers the challenge of Hamann.
NOTES
*
This is a very much enlarged version of a paper given in the conference Thought and
Language in the Philosophy of the Enlightenment, University of Toronto, October
18-20, 1985.
1
On August 5, Hamann
1781, wrote to Herder: "A week ago, in the morning, I
received a bound copy of Kant [the first Critique; Hamann had read the first 30 proof
sheets on April 7, 1781: letter to Hartknoch, April 8, 1781]. On 1 July I sketched a
review en gros, but put it back in my files, because I did not want to give offense to the
author, an old friend and I must almost say benefactor, since I had him to thank almost
entirely for my first job. But ifmy translation of Hume should ever see the light of day, I
will not mince matters, but say what I think". [Hamann was an enthusiastic follower of
Hume (he translated his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion into German), whose
analysis of belief as generated by habit or custom Hamann regarded as a form of
justification of faith based on tradition: "Hume is always my man, because he at least

honours the principle of belief and has taken it up into his system" (to Herder, May 10,
1781).]
2
Any effort to deal with the Herder material would take another two-volume work; I
will not discuss Herder in this paper.
3
To Jacobi, April 27, 1787: "What is the common way of word usage? Witnesses".
und = N
Zweifel Einf?lle (R IV, 328ff III, 191ff): "... All philosophical contradictions
and the whole historical riddle of our existence,... are resolved by the primal message
of the Word become flesh. This witness is the spirit of prophecy and the reward of its
promise, 'a new name which no one knows save he who receives it'".
4
In his way, Hamann put as much emphasis upon sensation as did Kant.
(Empfindung)
But the difference in usage is striking. In the first Critique Kant offers this definition: "A
perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation"
(A320/B376). In his various uses, Hamann means by the term any or all of the
following: sensation, sensory knowledge, sensibility, a felt association of personal trust in
what is being sensed, a private and ineffable epistemological coalescence of experiencer
and what is being experienced, an immediacy of experience with faith (as
conjoined
witnessing) that can only be destroyed if abstracted from its context. It is not unlike
Hamann to build a whole into a single term.
philosophico-theology
5
All translations of Harmann's works are those of Smith (1960). His translations are
generally excellent.
6
Hamann has much to say about abstract ideas, and most of it is philosophically quite
serious. In the opening paragraph of MPRV he praises Berkeley for his demotion of
universals to representing particulars. there is nothing in Hamann's color
Incidentally,
ful rejection of purported constitutive metaphysics that Kant would have objected to.
The big difference is one having to do with the role of reason.
7
Kant's discussion of the "clue" and its application to the derivation of the categories
follows A70-83/B95-109. In the second edition additions, at B109-110, Kant claims for
278 ROBERT E. BUTTS
the system of the categories that it alreadya complete

contains plan for a whole science
determinate the form of
and a system. He refers to
(pure physics), providing principles
Metaphysische Anfangsgr?nde der Naturwissenschaft, as the completion of a system in
which the table of logical forms of judgment reflects the system of categories, which in
turn are applied to the phoronomy, mechanics dynamics, and phenomenology of the
"special metaphysics" of matter. If this

is the path Kant's role of reason points to, we
can at least understand Hamann's deep existential distress. There appears to be no
confidence in science provided for in the writings of God.
8 = N
The Knight of Rosenkreuz's Last Will (R IV, 21 III, 27):"But everything divine
is also human; for man can neither work nor suffer except according to the analogy of
his nature, no matter how simple or how artificial a machine this nature is. This
communicatio of divine and human idiomatum is a basic law, and the main key to all our
knowledge and the whole visible economy".

9
The questions are of course rhetorical. Hamann knew that he and Kant had such deep
differences that no resolution could be hoped for. Enlightenment science and existential
Christianity are twain that shall never meet. What is to be hoped for in this investigation
of Hamann's reaction to Kant is a better understanding of Kant, and, I devoutly hope,
nothing more.
10
For example: "All language is signification of thought; the supreme way of indicating
thought is by language, the greatest instrument for understanding ourselves and others.
is speaking to ourselves" (Anthro, AK VII, 192); and "While as yet alone,
Thinking
man must have been moved
by the urge for communication to make his existence
known to other living
beings, particularly to such as utter sounds. These sounds he
could imitate, and they could later on serve as names. A similar effect of the above urge
may be observed even now. Children and thoughtless persons are apt to disturb the
thinking part of the community by rattling, shouting, whistling, singing and other kinds
of noisy entertainment, often also by religious devotions of such a nature. I can see no
motive for such conduct except the wish on the part of those who engage in it to make
their existence known to one and all" ('Conjectural Beginning of Human History', AK
VIII, HOn-llln.). The first sound is the result of an existential urge, but the language
which results is learned, not by means of divine instruction, but by means of attempted
pragmatic orientations in a shared

spatial and temporal environment. Much more could
be said about Kant's random
thoughts about language, but this is not the place. I will,
however, return to some of these points below in my discussion of the role of the sensus
communis in Kant and Hamann.
11
lam not here in a position to discuss the details of Kant's views on the semantical
opacity of dreams, of ESP reports, and of creatures of a deranged mind. See my (1984)
for details. However, I will have to note emphatically below that Hamann's trans
gression of the limits of the phenomenally knowable classifies him, by Kantian lights, as,
like Swedenborg, a Schw?rmer.
12 an English
Edward Young (1683-1765), writer whose works were much admired and
cited The Complaint or Night on Life, Death
by Hamann, especially Young's Thoughts
and (1742). believed that genuine literary creativity owes its power
Immortality Young
to defiance of literary convention, and in his theology taught that we have analogical
epistemic access to incorporeal forms of life. Both views are grist for Hamann's mill.
13
I am here omitting reference to crucial elements of Hamann's theology. Human
language in its purified, faith-informed, condition is fitted to symbolize the relevations of

God just because God became man: "In spite of the light which God sheds in our souls
by the Word, he wants to be near us himself. He is where his Word is, he is where his
Son is. If his Word is in us, his Son is in us; if his Word is in us, the Spirit of this Word is
in us" (Biblical Reflections, p. 129). The message of the incarnation that our language
comes to symbolize is of course a gnostic secret: a thing of faith.
literally,
14
I use the Meredith translation of Critique of Judgement; page references are to the
Academy Edition.
15
I cannot, for example, in a dream, distinguish between dreaming and being awake, so
long as I attend only to the appearance state given in my present intuition. Nor, in
exactly similar circumstances, can Imake the distinction between and wakeful
dreaming
consciousness while awake. Elsewhere Kant will insist that to make these and other
distinctions requires that I can move from inner sense to outer sense; in short, it requires
that I can only make the distinctions to my body and the bodies of others;
by reference
the form of space is a prerequisite for any warranted of judgments. Here, of
assertability
course, the question is one of communicability within a group of users, and the
language
best I can hope for is the form of consensus; I cannot enter into the minds of others.
16
This presentation of Kant's touchstone or test of the common sense can be
enlarged
to encompass his basic thoughts about the nature of enlightenment. We are familiar with
Kant's definition: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred (Ak
tutelage"
VIII, p. 35). The point is that we are to take responsibility for our own thoughts (and
resulting actions), because there is no other authority than reason; there is no appeal
except to what can count for all as a rational of belief or action. In the Logik
principle
(Ak VII, p. 57) he refers to an "external mark or an external touchstone of truth [as] the
comparison of our own judgement with those of others"; and he states that the common
= sensus
understanding (gemeine Menschenverstand communis) is "a touchstone to
discover the mistakes of the technical use of the "...this is what it
understanding";
means to orient oneself in thinking or in the speculative use of reason by common
understanding, when common understanding is used as a test of judging the correctness

of the speculative one". Here again we see the apparent force of the suggestion that we
place ourselves in thought in the place of the other, not by appeal to actual thoughts of
others, but by appeal to what could count for all as a matter of rational principle. The
point is put with evident force in the closing footnote of the 1786 essay, kWhat is
Orientation in Thinking?' (Ak VIII, p. 146): "Thinking for one's self means to seek the
supreme touchstone of truth in one's self; that is, in one's own reason; and the maxim
of always thinking for one's self is enlightenment.... To make use of one's reason
means nothing more than to ask one's self, with to everything that is to be
regard
assumed, whether he finds it practicable to make the ground of the assumption or the
rule which follows from the assumption a universal of the use of his reason.
principle
This test can be to himself
applied by each person and by this test he will soon see
superstitution and fanaticism disappear even if he is far from possessing the knowledge
requisite to a refutation of either on objective For he merely makes use of the
grounds.
maxim of the self-preservation of reason". All of this is typical of Kant: The test of
inwardness is the personal test of the rational of one's
universalizability subjective
commitments, and this test is viable even if one
does not in the given case know the
objective truth. It is the opposite of the Hamannian test of inwardness as the test of
280 ROBERT E. BUTTS
ineffable and
literally incommunicable personal faith. It is no wonder that Kierkegaard
come
to admire Hamann: -
will later both took intense inwardness committed and
- to
irrational subjectivity be the test, indeed, the essence, of truth.
17
The Prussian Magus had nothing but contempt for what he understood as the public,
and displayed this feeling in the defiant dedication of his Socratic Memorabilia (1759):
"To the Public, or Nobody, the Well-known". This work of course, is addressed in
reality to Kant and the businessman Berens, Kant's former student and Hamann's
former friend and employer. It was written after the failed attempt by Berens and Kant
to reconvert Hamann to the cause of the Enlightenment in the wake of his Christian
rebirth in London. The early relationships between these three young men were
apparently quite complicated, leading Hamann to distrust his early "public", and Kant
to stress the need for communication across character and social differences. Hamann
cherished his privacy and individuality; he was a "loner" who sought inner meaningful
ness in the darkness of his own faith. Kant was the popular lecturer, the writer, the host
at luncheons designed for maximum sharing of information on all topics of current
interest; he was, in the literal and non-perjorative sense, the publicist of the life of
reason.
18
I have no space to examine them in any detail here, but there are various word
usages and conceptual slursin the writings of Hamann that seem pretty directly aimed at
Kant. For example, he adopts the biblical literary device called "metaschematism"
(metaschematismus), and refers to the process of "metaschematizing" (meta
schematisiren). The reference is to I Corinthians 4:6, where metaschematizing has the
form of ambiguous exemplification, or exemplification by means of analogy. The story is
told "in a figure transferred" {meteschematisa, transfiguravi), or "by taking as an
example". Alexander (1966, pp. 153-55) points out that for a Christian the most
fundamental case
of such metaschematizing is the Incarnation itself: God identifying
himself with man,
although it is man who has turned against him. This most fundamental
of all ambiguities was surely taken by Hamann to justify even the most outrageous forms
of literary analogy. Given that Kant's appeal to schematization involves an effort to
insure that our semantics is one that leads us directly to unambiguous observables as
clear sensuous examples (meanings as referents) of our concepts, we have in Hamann's
preference for metaschematizing as deliberately ambiguous exemplification a not very
carefully concealed repudiation of Kant's kind of semantics. The Socratic Memorabilia

tells us that analogy was the soul of Socrates' reasoning, and this work is one so packed
with metaschematizing that one wonders just where is the leading thread. I suppose that
even this deep perplexity is likely one Hamann hoped for in his readers.
19
Butts (1984, Chap. Ill) contains a detailed of Kant's treatment of
investigation
Swedenborg, and Chapters IV and V discuss the problem of "locating" spirits and souls.
In the lecture notes referred to now as Metaphysik Dohna we find the marvellous line:
"Der Ort der Seele is da wo der Ort des Menschen ist". I take this line as a motto for
Kant's campaign to keep spirits and souls located in the public space of the lives of
mankind. The campaign is both philosophical and medical; it encourages both sound
epistemology and mental health.

20
Butts (1984, Central Nervous System), contains discussion of Kant's various warn
ings about and philosophical antidotes for Schw?rmerei. A particularly illuminating

discussion of the problems in connection with the differences between schemata and
symbols is at pages 68-74 of the second Critique.
21
I must admit that there
is much in the relationship between Kant and Hamann that is
apparently In his April

inscrutable. 8, 1766 letter to Mendelssohn replying to the
metaphysician's negative reaction to Tr?ume, Kant writes: "In my opinion, everything

depends on our seeking out the data of the problem, how is the soul present in the world,
both in material and in non-material things". Kant reads this question as one of
receptivity: how is it that we are affected by any external agencies? And he concedes
that the question of the union of the soul and the body is just a special case of this more
general problem. Nevertheless, his mature view is that the special problem is logically
incoherent, and thus he seems at various places in his writings to agree with Hamann's
verdict that "Unfortunately dreams and illnesses are the best data of the energy of our
soul" (to Scheffner, November 10, 1784). In this letter Hamann is replying to
Scheffner's request for an appraisal of Swedenborg's form of Schw?rmerei. Hamann
replies that Swedenborg's case is one of "transcendental in "critical
epilepsy", resulting
frothing" [babbling in tongues?]. Kant will soon conclude that receptivity is entirely a
matter of what we receive from "outer sensation", but this conclusion is compatible with
the view that the evidence for mental activity is "inner perception", which clearly
includes dreams, and observation of
suspected deranged behavior. In referring to
Swedenborg's alleged spiritual revelations as a kind of transcendental he may in

epilepsy
fact have been paying Kant a compliment for having realized that the question of the
data that affirm our knowledge of the soul or mind is one
that cannot, in Kant's sense,
be conceptualized. Apparently Kant's final conclusion is that the representation of inner
sense is an unconceptualizable a conclusion that, apart from
perception, entailing
subjective apperception, we have no knowledge of mental powers except that which we
derive from bodies in action in ordinary
spatial contexts. And from this it would seem to
follow that Kant's preferred psychology is either behaviouristic or based on observations
of psychopathological states. To be fair to Hamann thus seems to involve admitting that
he understood the direction of Kant's thinking about psychology better than any of
Kant's other contemporaries. It would have been quite natural for him to exclude
himself from those classified as transcendental Perhaps the irrationalities of
epileptics.
his own meditations on things unseen amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of the
correctness of Kant's diagnosis of Schw?rmerei. But one cannot be sure even at this
point, for Hamann often praises
the enthusiastic (schw?rmerisch) state because it is one
in which the mysteries are truly revealed. Hamann may have been clear-headed in his
understanding of Kant, but to set enthusiasm (which can become fanaticism) against
enlightenment draws the philosophical dividing line sharply.
22
In ?10 of the Dissertation Kant says that we have no intuition of things intellectual,
but only a symbolic cognition of them. He does not explain the distinction between
intuitive and symbolic cognition, which suggests that it is one that was in current use.
The suggestion is confirmed by the fact that the distinction is explicitly made in
Baumgarten's Metaphysica (?620). Recall that Baumgarten's text was used by Kant for
his lectures on metaphysics.
23
In Anthropologie (Ak VII, pp. 191-92) Kant repeats the substance of his discussion
in the third Critique. We are told, however, that extensive use of symbols reveals a
deficiency of concepts, and are treated to the delicious observation that when an
" "
American Indian says, Wir wollen die Streitaxt begraben", he means, Wir wollen Friede
machen". Apart from the fact that it is strange to imagine North American Native
People as speakers of German, I would have that if this is the way in which the
thought
282 ROBERT E. BUTTS
Native People interpret their metaphor, what is displayed is a richness of conceptual

resources, not an impoverishment of these resources. There are good and apt
metaphors, but Kant's insistence on discursive conceptual clarity often seems to get in
the way of his appreciation of this point.
24
I have avoided discussion of schematization of pure concepts of the understanding
for the sake of
concentrating efforts on comparison of Kant and Hamann. Schematic
of categories is obviously of paramount importance to Kant: categories are
application
applicable to possible experiences; ideas of reason are not. It is this important distinction
Kant wishes to emphasize in the passage we are now studying.
25
In discussion of this paper at the conference, Fran?ois Duchesneau, with charac
teristic philosophical acumen, pointed out that my account of the roles played by both
the sensus communis and symbolic cognition omits reference to the theory that underlies
Kant's entitlement to introduce such uncategorized forms of cognitive appeal. Of course
he is right. My account presupposes Kant's theory that distinguishes between determin
ing and reflective

judgments, and also between theoretical, practical and technical
judgments. For Kant, there is a crucial (even if unsuccessfully developed) difference

between judgments that make knowledge claims, those that assert moral imperatives,
and those that presuppose that what is being judged is produced by art or skill. I am
suggesting that Kant's reply to Hamann would have necessarily presupposed all of the
details of his account of theoretical knowledge, but that his direct rejection of Hamann's
confidence in symbolic expression would have been based on his theory of estimation or
reflective a theory dealing explicitly with questions of teleology, or of artful
judgment,
production. What strikes me as central to the reply I am having Kant make to Hamann
is that for Kant all questions of meaning and warranted assertability presuppose the
of public communicability. It is this presupposition that relates the appeal to
possibility
public sense and the viability of a communicable sense of symbolization as a language
use. I am grateful to Duchesneau for providing the opportunity to highlight these
fundamental matters.
REFERENCES
All references to the works of Kant are to page numbers of the Academy Edition, Kants
Gesammelte Schriften, abbreviated Ak, with volume numbers in Roman numerals, page
numbers in Arabic numerals. I have adopted the following abbreviations for frequently
cited works of Kant:
Anthro =
Anthropologie
KRV = Kritik der reinen
Vernunft
KU= Kritik der Urteilskraft
MAN = der Naturwissenschaft
Metaphysische Anfangsgr?nde
Tr?ume = Tr?ume eines Geistersehers
Translations of passages in KRV are those of Kemp Smith; passages in KU, those of
Meredith. The passage from 'Conjectural beginning of human history' is translated by
E. Fackenheim 1963, L. W. Beck (ed.), Kant on History, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis
and New York; the passage from the Logic, by R. Hartman and W. Schwarz: 1974,
Immanuel Kant. Logic, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis and New York.
All references to works of Hamann, except to the Socratic Memorabilia, are to the
translations in Smith (1960). I have abbreviated Hamann's Metakritik ?ber den Purismus
der reinen Vernunft as MPR V.
Other references:
Alexander, W. M.: 1966, Johann Georg Hamann. Philosophy and Faith, Martinus
Nijhoff, The Hague.
Baumgarten, A. G.:
1779, Metaphysica, Seventh edn, Herman Hemmerde, Halle,
(reproduction 1982, George Olms, Hildesheim.)
Beck, L. W.: 1969, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Butts, R. E.: 1984, Kant and the Double Government Methodology. Supersensibility and
Method in Kant's Philosophy of Science, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Herder, J. G.: 1799a, Verstand und Erfahrung. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen
Vernunft. Erster Theil. S?mtliche Werke XXI. (reproduction 1967, George Olms,
Hildesheim.)
Herder, J. G.: 1799b, Vernunft und Sprache. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen
Vernunft. Mit einer Zugabe, betreffend ein kritisches Tribunal aller Facult?ten,
Regierungen und Gesch?fte. Zeiter Theil. (reproduction 1967, George Olms, Hil
desheim.)
Hamann, J. G.: 1759, Socratic Memorabilia (Sokratische Denkw?rdigkeiten), Amsterdam.
Hamann, J. G.: 1781, 'A Review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason', in
unpublished,
Smith (1960), pp. 209-13.
Hamann, J. G.:
1784, 'Metacritique of the Purism of Reason', in 1800, in
published
Smith (1960), pp. 213-21.
Smith, R. G.: 1960, J. G. Hamann 1730-1788. A Study in Christian Existence, Collins,
London.
Young, E.: 1742, The Complaint or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality.
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario

London, Ont NGA 3K7
Canada

Butts, R. The Grammar of Reason. Hamann's Challenge To Kant

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Butts, R. The Grammar of Reason. Hamann's Challenge To Kant

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The Grammar of Reason: Hamann's Challenge to Kant

Author(s): Robert E. Butts

THE GRAMMAR OF REASON:

Among the critical responses to his Critique of Pure Reason of which

Synthese 75 (1988) 251-283.

thoughts on language that are to be found in Kant's writings, and an

Hamann called his philosophy "verbalism"; the word refers to a

(2) The of man is a language close to God's, a language of

sage to us, which man must receive by divine instruction.

(3) There is a human of pseudo-reason which uses abstractions and

language in that it creates its own sensuously present objects.

I will not provide detailed analysis of this metaphysics of language; my

purpose here is not exegesis of Hamann's vastly complex foreshadow

extent of the categories is the table of judgments, a list of grammatical

I have endeavored to present Hamann's metacriticism of what he

(1) Concepts of the understanding (categories: substance,

word-game. He has also dismissed the system of the categories [(1)] as

are empirically discovered. And what he has in mind is rather special,

meanings can be publicly shared through discussion and debate. The

Kant provides us with a clear and definite concept of the sensus

places Hamann appears to be using the term to refer to a "common

simply what we have always taken it to be: a socially perpetuated and

experiences only I am authoritative. When I speak I solicit your faith

appeal to a sensuous emblem whose referent is supernatural and

In this place there follows a discussion of taste as a public sense, but

requiring subjective causes, is valid for every rational agent. If my

If my conditional assertion is regarded as merely an appearance in my

Assuming then that we all do seek to rest the assertability of our

I hope that my account of the two men's uses of this remarkable

Return, then, to the second class of concepts, empirical concepts, and

(1) If this x is a trilobite then its identifiable features will

(3) If this x is a trilobite then the results of carbon dating will

kyriological, historical or symbolical or hieroglyphical, philosophical or characteristic.

And shows the stuff, but not the workman's skill;

I will not repeat discussion of the features of Hamann's views on

What we find is that Kant

causal basis of all existence. Ordinary knowledge of material objects is

experience or a sensible intuition for the human mind" (p. 338).

339). We represent God as angry and vengeful, just as poets personify

The second thing we learn is that metaphors used to express hidden

Swedenborg he sought also a new interpretation of the Bible. Like

If we are to understand how to portray representations clearly, we

whose sole function is to allow us to reinvoke a given concept by

being for a purpose. Proper cognition that can provide knowledge is

What remains is to apply this enriched analysis of symbolic cognition

meet. Hermeneutics and philosophical analysis are just such worlds

tenment, freedom from self-incurred tutelage. It is Kant's critical

justification of faith based on tradition: "Hume is always my man, because he at least

the system of the categories that it alreadya complete

"special metaphysics" of matter. If this

knowledge and the whole visible economy".

pragmatic orientations in a shared

language in its purified, faith-informed, condition is fitted to symbolize the relevations of

understanding, when common understanding is used as a test of judging the correctness

preference for metaschematizing as deliberately ambiguous exemplification a not very

carefully concealed repudiation of Kant's kind of semantics. The Socratic Memorabilia

epistemology and mental health.

ings about and philosophical antidotes for Schw?rmerei. A particularly illuminating

symbols is at pages 68-74 of the second Critique.

apparently In his April

metaphysician's negative reaction to Tr?ume, Kant writes: "In my opinion, everything

Swedenborg's alleged spiritual revelations as a kind of transcendental he may in