Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Groundwork for physics of morals (1822)

The title of Beneke’s Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten is an obvious play with Kant’s Groundwork for metaphysics of morals: in essence, Beneke appears to be suggesting that morals should be brought down from the abstractions of Kantian ethics and into the natural world we live in. This attempt is evident, firstly, in the form Beneke chooses - it is not written as a scholarly book, but as a collection of letters sent to a Kantian friend. In addition, Beneke sides, against Kant, with Jacobi, a philosopher of the concrete.

Beneke’s attack against Kantian morals goes farther than these rather formal matters. The main point of content Beneke has with Kant is that morals and ethics are not primarily based upon reasoning, but on feeling. In one sense, this is just a restatement of Beneke’s thesis that all conceptual activities are just reactivations of sensory and perceptual activities. On the other hand, Beneke’s statement has also stronger implications - he wants to say that what we feel to be moral or immoral is our only criterion for stating what is moral or immoral.

Beneke’s criterion of morality goes against some central Kantian tenets about morality, first of them being that moral behaviour should be based on an assumed absolutely free choice of noumenal will. As Kantians would note, feelings are part of the physical world and therefore always have causes and therefore are not absolutely free, unlike they thought human reason to be. Beneke would agree, but also reject the whole notion of absolutely free choice - all we need in morality is free will in the sense of a will not affected by external coercion.

Furthermore, Kantians would note that feeling can never be a universally valid criterion for anything, since feelings differ from one individual to another. Beneke, on the other hand, is against the very notion of a priori certain statements, except as statements that we feel to be true whatever our circumstances. Furthermore, he contends that ethics need not be universally valid, but could be, for instance, relative to culture. His pet example is bigamy, which is ethically wrong in Europe, but might be acceptable for cultures where men have higher sex drives (Beneke does not consider the possibility of females with a higher sex drive). He also appears to accept that different cultural values can be graded and that civilisation brings with it higher values.

Beneke does give a sort of definition of what immoral or unethical activity consists of - activity is immoral, when it has been caused by a desire so extensive that it hinders other desires. Note that Beneke is not saying that immorality would be connected to a too extensive pleasure. In fact, he is very much against what he calls a monkish attitude in which all pleasures are disparaged. For instance, there is nothing wrong in enjoying the carnal delights, but it is only when a person becomes addicted to these delights and when too much of her time is spent in trying to obtain them that her actions become immoral. Beneke also notes that this definition of immorality/morality is in a sense not dependent on the culture - one is not immoral or moral because of one’s values, but because of how well one lives in accordance with these values.

What seems at first unclear is how to extend this definition to ethics involving persons other than oneself. Beneke’s answer is simply to assume that people also have desire to help other people and too strong egoistic desires hinder the altruistic desires. What Beneke does not seem to have considered is the possibility that a person might not have any altruistic desires - such a person would not, according to Beneke’s definition, be immoral, although he would always act egoistically.

An interesting consequence of Beneke’s feeling-based ethics is that he can assume the existence of moral geniuses, who have an instinctual knack of doing the right thing. Beneke also notes that just like aesthetic excellence comes in two variations - beauty based on harmony of forces and sublimity based on grandiosity of a single force - similarly ethical excellence comes in two shapes. Firstly, he notes, there is the ethical excellence arising out of lack of ethical struggles or a state of complete innocence, and secondly, there is also the excellence arising out of struggle with strong desires. Considering for a while, which type of excellence is better, he then comes to the conclusion that ethical behaviour generated from struggle is at least more stable - an innocently ethical person might later succumb to the temptations of strong desires.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: New foundation for metaphysics (1822)

Beneke’s Neue Grundlegung zur Metaphysik is a programmatic declaration of the possibility of metaphysics. Beneke does not give a definite explanation of metaphysics, but he evidently contrasts it with a mere study of human consciousness - metaphysics, in comparison, deals with being and not mere thinking.

Problem of justifying the possibility metaphysics means then for Beneke a problem for showing that we can think of something we know to exist. Beneke’s not that original solution is to note that when we think of our very activities of thinking, we necessarily think of something that exists, because self-evidently our own activities of thinking must exist, whenever we happen to think them.

Beneke’s aim in pointing out this rather clear-looking fact is to argue against a position he calls strong idealism.This strong idealism is apparently supposed to endorse the notion that we can never connect thinking with being, but are always closed within the circle of mere representations of being. It is not at first clear why Beneke would call such a position idealism, but he is at least thinking about Kant’s notion of inner sense, which he explicitly denies.

It might be that Beneke and Kant are speaking of two different things. When talking about inner sense, Kant wants to emphasise that we cannot know even ourselves from a perspective reaching over our experience and that we therefore cannot know e.g. whether we are immortal and immaterial entities or material objects. Beneke accepts this, but insists that we still can know something about our mental life, namely, its existence as such, and even more, what this mental life feels to us. Of course, Kant might object that none of this is enough for knowledge, but we might well ask whether Kant just has a too tight definition of knowledge.

Although Beneke speaks against idealism, he is also willing to speak against a crude sort of realism that would state that we have as immediate connection with other things as with ourselves. Beneke still admits, against what he calls weak idealism, that we can know the existence of other things, although only mediately. The link between our immediate knowledge of ourselves and mediate knowledge of other things is, according to Beneke, our knowledge of our own bodies - we know our bodies just as we know our mental life, but our bodies are also causally connected to other bodies (Beneke deals here briefly with the Humean problem of how we recognise causality, and like in his earlier work, he insists that we can through an indefinite number of repeats become more and more certain of the existence of such a causal connection).

Although the lens of the body allows us to recognise the existence of other things, Beneke says, it also restricts our knowledge to a certain perspective. In other words, Beneke is of the opinion that we know other things more completely, if they happen to resemble ourselves. Even things quite removed from us, such as mere material objects with no life or consciousness, can be known only through the lens of our own bodily feelings - for instance, we can understand the physical movement of objects through our own experiences of moving through space.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Experiental study of soul as a foundation for all knowledge in its main branches (1820)

(1797-1854)

If you know German philosophy of early 19th century merely from summarised compendiums, you might think that only one line of thinkers followed Immanuel Kant: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. You might have read of Schopenhauer as an afterthought, especially if the compendium dealt with the whole of 19th century, but you would most likely not see any mention of Beneke. Still, he took Kantian philosophy in a direction completely different from any of the other thinkers mentioned above.

Beneke’s Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens in ihren Hauptzügen, a book about “study of soul” or psychology, is an example of this direction. The name of the book already reveals important duality in Beneke’s account of psychology. Firstly, he thinks that psychology should be based on experience and observations. Beneke notes that although empiricism has been an important philosophical school, empirical psychology has not been truly developed since the times of Plato and Aristotle. He remarks that this lack of development has been mostly due to prejudices obscuring this topic, although soul - our own mental life - should be something quite familiar to us. Hence, empiricists have been more successful with natural than human sciences.

Secondly, Beneke notes that psychology is important due to a speculative or idealistic principle. What Beneke means by this principle is not any metaphysical theory about the nature of reality as such nor is it any attempt to explain the essence of soul, like Wolffian rational psychology had been. Instead, Beneke just emphasises the rather obvious truth that we humans can never have any access to any supposedly “neutral”, “completely objective” or God’s viewpoint. Thus, all science is science made by and for humans and study of human beings or psychology must then be the foundation of all science.

Beneke is of the opinion that Kantian philosophy united at least in some sense these two complementary viewpoints. Yet, the problem of Kant’s philosophy and his most famous followers, Beneke suggested, was that they didn’t attempt to make precise observation of human mental life. Beneke himself holds that psychology should use a Euclidean method - his suggestion seems to be that psychology should find the most basic elements of human mental life and explain everything else in mental life through these elements, just like Euclid explained geometry through simple elements, like points and lines.

Beneke’s first task is then to identify basic activities of human mental life. He notes that there are three such activities. The first one of these humans share with all animals, that is, the activity involved with the maintenance of animal body. The second activity consists then of sensory activity, and finally, the third consists of muscular activity. Beneke’s terminology is here somewhat confusing, as he speaks of these activities as being unitary, while still corresponding to multiplicity of faculties, for instance, sensory activity being instantiated by five sensory faculties of touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. More important than this terminological muddle is Beneke’s remark that it is quite impossible to separate any body and soul within these activities - for instance, we do not have a separate soul using body to receive sensations, but in sensations, and indeed, in all human life, mental and physical aspects are completely intertwined.

Beneke also says that traditionally different senses have been divided into subjective and objective kinds. He opposes this division, because human life does not neatly divide into subjective and objective components - each human being is a subjective individual, but also shares features with other human beings and is in this sense objective. He does admit some gradual difference in the subjectivity and objectivity of senses: smell, taste and touch deal with sensations that are more individual than sounds and visions.

Beneke’s main thesis is that no new faculties are required for explaining human mental life. In one sense this is just a piece of propaganda against previous philosophers: when a Wolffian mentions e.g. a faculty of memory, he is just saying in a curt fashion that humans can, among other things, remember things, but he is not insisting upon any distinct activity of memorising (in fact, many Wolffians wanted to explain these “faculties" or capacities through a single activity).

In another sense, Beneke’s suggestion fails at a deeper level. An important part in Beneke’s reconstruction of mental phenomena is to note that humans can reawaken former, already weakened perceptual activities - this is the foundation of memory and conceptual activities. One might firstly remark that this act of reawakening of perceptual activities - say, imagining a face of an absent person - is an activity quite different from perceiving the face of a present person, because one can clearly imagine things without at the same time perceiving them. It is as if Beneke has confused the similarity of the experiences of perceived and imagined face with the identity of activities behind them. Secondly, even these experiences are clearly of different nature, as was noted already by Hume: perceptions are livelier than imaginations.

With the assumption of reawakening of activities, it is easy for Beneke to reconstruct more complex cognitive activities. Indeed, for Beneke concepts - or conceptual activities, as he prefers - just are activities composed of simple, reawakened activities. For example, concept of flower, in a particular human being, is just the sum of memories of all flowers she has perceived. These concepts might then be connected with muscular activities of tongue etc., thus leading to invention of language.

It is clear that such psychologically understood concepts are very idiosyncratic, because humans might connect very different memories to same word. Indeed, he insists, individual perceptions of same thing are more alike in different persons than their concepts of these things. Concepts might be more universal than perceptions in the sense that many perceptions can awaken same conceptual activities in us, but this doesn’t make these conceptual activities any more necessary.

Despite the idiosyncrasy of concepts, Beneke does not want to say that they would be subjective in comparison with objective perceptions. Beneke is trying to point out that notions like subjectivity and objectivity are a matter of degree. He suggests this as an essential correction of the Kantian idea that space is subjective. This is true of all we experience, Beneke states, but space is still more objective than some other experiences, because it is experienced in a similar manner by all humans.

While conceptual activities are for Beneke unified complexes of activities, judgements are, on the other hand, comparisons of conceptual activities: e.g. in a positive judgement, one notes that a concept is similar to another, in whole or partially. For instance, judgements “this rose is red" means that a conceptual activity of thinking this rose is a part of the conceptual activity of thinking all red things one has perceived. Judgements are then certain, if the concepts involved are clear. Deductions are finally formed of chains of such comparisons of clear concepts.

A clear problem in this rather naive conception of certainty is the problem of induction. How can one be certain that all ravens are black, if one hasn’t perceived all ravens? Beneke’s solution is just to embrace the problem: certain universal judgements require infinity of perceptions. Then again, he admits, there are different grades of certainty, and the more we see perceptions verifying a universal judgement, the more certain the judgement is.

The difference of empirically and a priori certain judgements - and therefore of empirical and a priori sciences - is then only relative and lies in the ease, in which we can find instances verifying them: for a priori certain judgements, all experiences of certain sort provide positive instances. Thus, certainty of mathematics (apparently just geometry) is based on structure of human vision, while certainty of logic is based on structure of human conceptual activities.

As simple as Beneke’s solution of the problem of induction is his solution of Humean problem of causality. In fact, it is for Beneke just one modification of the first problem. A causal judgement, he says, just indicates that one of type of perception always follows another type of perception, and certainty of such a judgement is verified in the same manner as of every other universal judgement. In case of the general principle of causality - every event has its cause - the certainty is based on the very nature of human perception to consist of a series of interconnected events.

As a priori sciences Beneke mentions also aesthetics and ethics, which have to do with feelings or moods. A kind of starting point for Beneke’s account of feelings is provided by the traditional idea of four temperaments. Especially important are the elements out of which Beneke reconstructs the temperaments. These are the complementary aspects of receptivity for external stimuli and force of maintaining inner activity. Both aspects can be stronger or weaker, creating thus four different combinations or temperaments.

The two components of external stimuli and use of inner force are, according to Beneke, also components of feelings, together with basic activities and their combinations or concepts. While there are innumerably many manners to combine different quantities of stimuli and inner force, Beneke underlines three limit cases, corresponding to important aesthetical concepts: state of heightened external stimuli is an experience of pleasurable, state of heightened inner force is an experience of sublimity, and finally, state of balance between stimuli and inner force is an experience of beauty.

Beneke explains these three notions in detail only in relation to basic activities, but these examples suffice. All nourishing activities and lower sensory faculties (smell, taste and touch) are too fleeting to be capable of anything else but the feeling of pleasure, but with other basic activities, Beneke says, all three feelings are present. Thus, quick sounds, variety of irregular shapes and rocking movement are all pleasurable, long sounds, lack of shapes and storm are all sublime, and harmonious sounds, regular shapes and rocking of boat in storm are beautiful.

Kant had famously noted that pleasure wasn’t a topic of what we would call an aesthetical study. In a sense, Beneke concurs, because external stimuli causing pleasures are again very idiosyncratic and therefore mostly incapable of generalisation. Then again, inner force is supposedly something similar from one person to another, which makes sublimity capable of generalisation. Like in other cases, beauty lies also here between pleasure and sublimity, which Beneke uses to account for Kantian idea that judgements of beauty are in a sense both subjective and at least demand universalisation. Now, while Kant had not indicated that a feeling of sublimity would be fully generalisable, he had compared completely idiosyncratic pleasure and subjective, but universality demanding beauty with the objective and fully universal demands of moral principles. In a sense, Beneke follows Kant by taking sublimity as a foundation of the final a priori science or morality.

Beneke’s account of morality is linked to his idea of desire and purposeful activity. Sometimes, he describes, a mental activity, while still active in some sense, points to a more full realisation of itself and thus comes with a yearning toward this fuller realisation - this is a state of desire. Desire as such does not suffice for fulfilling the yearning, and on occasion, desire remains without this actualisation as a mere desire. At other times, desire is fulfilled by an activity, which could then be called purposeful action. While the fulfilling activity can be called purposeful the desiring activity itself is not purposeful - for instance, while an artist creates a work of art through a purposeful activity, aiming to realise an internal idea of an artwork, this internal idea has not come about through any purposeful activity.

Now, human beings make judgements about other humans and their inner mental life through feelings the actions of others generate in them. According to Beneke, it is apparently the feeling of sublimity, from which we can recognise truly moral persons (Beneke thinks that it is especially the individuals and their virtues, which should be the topic of morality). In other words, the feeling of sublime gives an ideal of behaviour, with which to compare concrete human beings. It goes without saying that this ideal lies then not in susceptibility to external stimuli, but on the contrary, in independence from external stimuli.