PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND OF GRETE HERMANN’S WORK
By Fernando Leal, for Aberdeen Univ. Workshop on Grete Hermann, May 2012
Grete Hermann was a Kantian. That sounds like much, but it isn’t, really. The truth of the
matter is that all German scholars after Kant have been Kantians. This is just a fact about the
history of German thought. Kant was and is the greatest success ever in German intellectual
life. He somehow managed to convert everyone to his particular way of seeing things and
asking questions. And so what we need to know is what kind of Kantian Grete Hermann was.
She is a member of one very particular tradition of Kantian thought. At the risk of
oversimplification one could say that there are three great post-Kantian traditions. To avoid
misunderstanding, let me hasten to add that none of these traditions was servile. All three
were critical of Kant, but all wanted to build upon Kant’s work. It was everywhere a matter of
separating the good parts in Kant from the bad parts. The difference between the three
traditions have precisely to do with what each thought were the good and the bad parts.
In order to gain a little perspective, let me say briefly what was Kant all about. He was
the heir of the two greatest revolutions in thought that transformed Europe, and in due time
the rest of the world. One was the Scientific Revolution, about which all I need to emphasize
here is that the key to its success was the employment of mathematics (algebra and analysis)
for scientific purposes. The other was what we may call the Liberal Revolution, whose
purpose and result was to free people from the shackles of the ancien régime; we all, you and
I, happen to live free in that sense because liberalism triumphed completely after many
struggles, so that we (somewhat ungratefully) take the freedoms we enjoy for granted. Both
revolutions were long in preparation, as the historians have proved, but they came to fruition
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And it was at the end of the eighteenth century
that Kant began to develop his philosophy.
Because Kant was, and understood himself to be, the heir of these two tremendously
successful revolutions, it is no surprise that his philosophy had two main goals. One was to
explain how human beings were capable of scientific (including mathematical) thinking. The
other was to develop a coherent (ie complete and consistent) version of liberalism as a way of
collective life on the basis of a new ethical, educational, legal and political order. The first
goal was purely theoretical, the second goal mainly practical. However, Kant had one big
problem: his theory of how science was possible seemed to make liberalism theoretically
impossible. Science in Kant’s view was and could only be causal and deterministic, yet causal
determinism seems to undermine any idea of freedom and free will. This big problem still
haunted Grete Hermann, as I shall try to explain in my second talk, which is why her ideas on
quantum mechanics cannot be separated from her ideas about ethics and politics. In fact, the
problem still haunts contemporary philosophers, who keep trying to solve it and at the same
time to refute each other’s solutions.
I said that there are basically three traditions of German post-Kantian thinking. Two of
them are scientifically minded, one is not. For lack of time I am going to ignore the latter. For
those who know something about the history of philosophy, the names of Fichte, Schelling
and Hegel may indicate the general direction of that particular tradition, which is by the way
still alive and kicking. But let’s concentrate on the other two traditions.
One of the two scientifically minded post-Kantian traditions has been cultivated by, and
belongs to, scientists and mathematicians. As I said before, Kant wanted to explain how
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science (including mathematics) was possible. In the course of his explanation he said many
intriguing things, things that provoked and challenged German mathematicians and scientists.
All along the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries they responded to those challenges in
different ways. Their responses gave birth to the German versions of Euclidean and nonEuclidean geometry, mathematical logic and the axiomatization of arithmetic, algebra and
analysis, cell biology, psychophysiology, and solutions to the foundational crisis of physics. If
you read carefully the writings of German and German-influenced authors in all these fields,
you will see for yourself that Kant is a constant discussion partner, from Gauss to Einstein
and beyond.
The second scientifically-minded post-Kantian tradition belongs not to scientists or
mathematicians but to philosophers who were not, or not to a great extent practitioners of
either mathematics or science, but who had studied mathematics and science (especially but
not exclusively physics). This second tradition was started by a now almost forgotten author
called Jakob F. Fries, and there is a more or less continuous link between his work and that of
Grete Hermann. I say ‘more or less continuous’ because there is a curious historical gap of
about 50 years, between 1859 and 1904, in which the philosophers belonging to this tradition
– let’s call it the Friesian tradition – did not actively maintain relations with scientists and
mathematicians of the first tradition. I personally think that this was a great disgrace for the
Friesian school. Anyway, from 1904 until his death in 1927, the German philosopher Leonard
Nelson resurrected the Friesian tradition in all its earlier aspects. Like a good Friesian, he
studied philosophy, mathematics, physics and the law. He maintained relations with some of
the best mathematicians and physicists of his time, notably with David Hilbert and his circle.
And he developed a systematic revised critical version of Kant’s philosophy in no less than
nine solid volumes of work, recently completed by two additional slimmer ones.
Now, his most brilliant student, Grete Hermann, herself a trained mathematician, became
his assistant and collaborator (and much later one of the editors of the above-mentioned
Collected Works in nine volumes). During the time of the collaboration between Nelson and
Hermann, the latter came to question the two fundamental aspects of Nelson’s philosophy,
corresponding to the two main goals of any Kantian philosopher.
On the theoretical side, Nelson was witness to the emergence of special and general
relativity, although not so much of quantum mechanics anymore, because its emergence and
consolidation coincided with Nelson’s last years of life and his death. But he, like other
members of the Friesian school, including mathematician Paul Bernays, and in fact many
other authors were quite sceptical of relativity in the beginning. In a note written shortly
before his death, Nelson even regretfully suggests that philosophy and physics must go each
their own way for a while, until some form of reconciliation is found. In fact, his very last
published paper confirmed his firm belief in Euclidean geometry against Minkowski’s
spacetime.
Now Grete Hermann shared Nelson’s and Bernays’ doubts, which only became greater
when quantum mechanics was developed and eventually accepted. And so she came to do
what you already know – she participated in Heisenberg’s seminar, had those famous
discussions with him and with Carl F. von Weizsäcker, and as a result of those she wrote two
papers, ‘The philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics’ in 1935, and ‘On the
foundations of physical sentences in the older and the newer theories’ in 1937. It is not for
me, but for this whole workshop to say to what extent Grete Hermann’s proposals manage to
effect some form of reconciliation between modern physics and those concepts and principles
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which in all Kantian philosophy underlie physics as a science, viz Euclidean space, causality,
and so on.
On the practical side, Nelson developed a causal account of how a special kind of
interest, the so-called moral interest, can gain the upperhand in the struggle against other
kinds of interest, so that people as individuals and collectives of people (groups, comunities,
nations, humankind itself) can become moral. This causal account of moral decision making
was indeed posited by him as the ultimate basis on which individual ethics, the educational
system, and the legal and political order of liberalism (or rather, a special combination of
liberalism and socialism) had to be constructed. Nelson himself developed all those topics in
three of the nine volumes I mentioned earlier. By the way, he enjoyed the assistance of Grete
Hermann for a good part of this work.
So far, the whole thing looks very academic and dry. But it was not. Nelson’s work in
these three volumes was certainly theoretical in the sense that it was a relentless sequence of
philosophical argumentation that has few equals in contemporary philosophy; but it was not
only theoretical. The whole point of the exercise was actually to realise those ideas, to make
them work in the real world. Nelson’s school was not just a philosophical schools like all the
others. Their members were supposed to try and create the society envisaged as the moral
one. So Nelson’s school was an activist movement as well, with an educational branch and a
political branch. In the panel session we shall give you some more details about that
movement. The important thing is that the movement was grounded on a detailed
philosophical argumentation one of whose crucial elements was the said causal account of
moral decision making.
Now Grete Hermann had doubts about the practical part of Nelson’s philosophy.
Although a very young woman and probably in awe of her teacher, she challenged him.
According to her own report, Nelson told her before the 1925 Christmas holidays (less than
two years before his death) that his account of moral decision making was crucial to the
whole philosophical project they both shared, and he begged her to have a close look at it. She
did; in fact she never stopped doing so for the rest of her life. In a manuscript written in 1978,
six years before her own death, she wrote that she was still working at it. But even as Nelson
was still alive, she told him that she completely disagreed with his account of moral decision
making, and how the moral interest overcomes the other interests in the human heart. Nelson,
always the true philosopher, told her immediately, ‘Now you are on the right path.’ I cannot
elaborate on the significance of this reply now, but I promise to come back to it in my second
talk. Suffice it to say that the issue was both theoretical and practical, because it was
conceived as both, and Grete Hermann took both sides equally seriously.
You can probably guess at least what the theoretical issue is by now. It has to do with the
fact that Nelson’s account is causal, or more precisely that it is causal on the surface yet there
is a non-causal account running through it, so that both accounts are mixed up.
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COMPLEMENTARITY IN ETHICS?
‘Now you are on the right path.’ That is what Leonard Nelson shortly before his death told
Grete Hermann when she expressed her complete disagreement with his account of moral
decision making. In my experience, people laugh when the anecdote is repeated. It is just too
cute. But what does it mean?
You must remember that the whole issue is not, as with common-or-garden philosophers,
merely theoretical. Philosophers have ever since Socrates elaborated a bewildering variety of
ethical systems. Some systems tell us about how one should live and what one should do
(what is nowadays called ‘practical’ or ‘applied’ ethics), some systems tell us about what is
the meaning of ethical talk (what is nowadays called ‘meta-ethics’), most are a mixture of
both. Rarely has a philosopher been embarrassed to do one or both these things. On the other
hand, what is not only rare but extremely rare is a philosopher who actually lives the way he
talks. Socrates was certainly one of them. Nelson and Grete Hermann were Socratics in that
particular sense. They walked the talk.
But how did it all start? How did they decide to make their lives agree with what their
theories? That is what Nelson was trying to give an account for. I told you in my first talk that
Nelson, partly assisted by Hermann, wrote three thick volumes on ethics. The first volume,
dedicated to David Hilbert no less, was called, in conscious imitation of Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason. It was completed and published in 1917, when Nelson was 36 years old.
I’ll come back to it in a moment. The second volume, although published posthumously in
1932, was dedicated to individual morality (the duties and ideals of a moral person) and to
moral education. The third volume, published in 1924 because of the urgency felt in a
politically chaotic Germany, developed Nelson’s philosophy of law as well as his political
philosophy. We could say that the second volume was about the individual and the third about
society. But Nelson made clear that the ideas presented there were a consequence of the ideas
of the first volume.
The first volume, the Critique of Practical Reason, has four parts. Here I only want to
talk about the third part. What Nelson offers there is called ‘deduction’. Any modern reader
would understand this word in the sense of modern mathematical logic, ie as ‘logical
inference’ or ‘logical derivation’. That would be wrong. The word ‘deduction’ was borrowed
by Kant from legal practice, and in fact from liberal legal practice. A liberal judge does not
just mechanically apply whatever laws are given beforehand, but rather makes an effort to
‘find the law’ that applies to the case brought before him. This process of ‘finding the law’
was apparently called ‘deduction’ in Kant’s time, long before it began to be used in the
general sense of ‘reasoning’. I am sure you know that it was Peirce who first brought some
order in the terms European authors (from Francis Bacon to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) used to
differentiate between kinds of reasoning.
The analogy Kant had in mind is that people were like judges who were trying to ‘find
the law’ that could be applied to decision making. When people succeed in finding it, what
they find is the law that has to be followed. Kant thought that everytime we manage to make
experiences, either in ordinary life or in science, we ‘found the law’, in this case the law of
nature, physical law; and everytime we manage to be moral, we also find the law – the moral
law – and we act upon it. To illustrate my point, in the 1999 film The Confession there is a
scene in which an unctuous lawyer (played, very appropriately, by Alec Baldwin) is talking to
an accountant (amazingly played by Ben Kingsley) who has murdered three people
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responsible for his son’s death, has confessed to the murder, and is waiting for trial. Baldwin
is trying to convince Kingsley to allege temporary insanity, whereas Kingsley says he acted
deliberately and so has to be punished for his crime with the maximum penalty. At some point
Kingsley says pointedly that ‘all he wants is to do the right thing’. Baldwin sees his chance
and airily says that ‘it is very difficult to do the right thing’. Kingsley looks at his lawyer the
way a father looks at a son who is too clever by half and retorts: ‘Oh it is not difficult to do
the right thing. It is sometimes difficult to know what the right thing is. But once you know it,
it is very easy to do it.’ Well, this is precisely what Kant means. ‘Deduction’ or ‘finding the
law’ means ‘knowing what the right thing is’.
Now Kant was somewhat fuzzy about what ‘deduction’ actually implies, how to go about
it. In fact, the section called ‘Transcendental Deduction’ in his Critique or Pure Reason is
probably the most discussed piece in all of Kant’s work, and there is no end to the
controversies. It is ccertainly not a logical analysis of concepts or anything like it, although
some interpreters have tried their hand at making it look like it is. Jakob Fries, the founder of
the philosophical tradition to which Grete Hermann belongs, said it was something like
psychological introspection. Nelson bought that, and his ‘deduction of the moral law’ is a
deeply introspective (and largely causal) account of the moral struggle.
What is the purpose of the exercise? Nelson’s ‘deduction of the moral law’ is an extended
meditation of who we are as human beings. As a meditation it is as deeply personal as the
original Cartesian meditations. Descartes wrote his book as an outline of the kind of
meditation that one ought to do once in one’s life. By going through the meditation one would
apprehend once and for all who one was – and by the sheer force of such an apprehension
one’s life would change forever. My point is that Nelson pursued the same goal. His
‘deduction’ was a guideline to a personal meditation, a portrait of how you have to go inside
yourself and try to ‘find the law’, viz the moral law that binds your actions. By finding it, by
‘knowing what the right thing is’, like Kingsley’s character, it would be easy to do it. The
meditating person who went through this would know once and for all what his or her duty
was and how he or she would have to live his or her life from now on. Whether he or she was
to be a moral person would be no more a matter of chance after the meditation. In fact, the
kind of chance that makes some of us good and some of us less good or outright bad would be
removed, overcome forever.
I don’t know what you think about all this, but I can tell you that Grete Hermann did not
buy it. And although she kept thinking about the issues involved until her death, there is an
interim report (her contribution to Nelson’s memorial volume, published in 1953) in which
she suggests that Bohr’s idea of complementarity might help us to see what is wrong in
Nelson’s ‘deduction’. You are the experts in complementarity, so I have to tread lightly here.
For the purposes of the following discussion let’s assume that complementarity implies that
for a given event or phenomenon there are two opposite conceptions of it, two conceptions
that cannot be true at the same time. Well, Grete Hermann thought that every cognitive
operation (never mind whether it is purely theoretical and oriented to knowing what is the
case, or whether it is practical and oriented toward acting in the world) can be comprehended
in two incompatible ways – either in terms of causes and effects, or in terms of reasons.
But here comes the intriguing part.
It is very easy to read Grete Hermann in a sense akin to the old anti-psychologistic
critique of authors like Frege and Husserl (or even Bolzano). One of her examples is the
process of solving a simple multiplication problem. It is on the one hand clear that we could
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make a causal inquiry into how a given person (eg a child) actually goes about solving the
problem. Such a causal, at bottom psychological, inquiry would have to study processes of
memory, attention, and perhaps certain cognitive illusions to which the human mind is prone.
It is on the other hand equally clear that one can make a non-causal inquiry as to the steps that
logically lead to a solution. There is a whole branch of mathematics, or even several ones, that
deal with this. It is a much older subject, but ever since the advent of formal logic the field
has been tremendously successful.
By comparing these two kinds of inquiry, the logical and the psychological, it would
seem (1) that it is a tremendous fallacy to confuse the two, which is why the famous critique
of psychologism is generally considered definitive, (2) that there is no third kind of inquiry
different from these two, and (3) that the two inquiries are equally justified. It would seem to
follow that complementarity means here that what one knows by means of the causal inquiry
is incompatible with what one knows by means of the logical inquiry, yet both grasp
something that is true.
Well, this is not at all what Grete Hermann was up to. If she was, then his whole analogy
with complementarity would be sadly lacking and uninteresting. She was not at all interested
in the logical aspect as such. Rather, she thought that the very process of thinking, as it has
actually happened in the mind of, say, a child who has been trying to solve a multiplication
problem, as a real process (not an ideal process to be studied by logicians), has two sides that
are complementary. One side is psychological in the ordinary sense of the word; we have
already described it. Yet the other side of the process we may call psychological as well but
we should be clear that it is subtly different from the first. The first side is so to speak
external, its form of inquiry observational: the inquirer is trying to explain what the child did.
The other side is internal, for here we do not observe the process from the outside as it were,
but from the inside, we try to carry it out ourselves in the same way it was carried out by the
child: we as inquirers are trying to understand the reasons the child had for proceeding the
way he or she did.
In each case we have to do with the very same real psychological, cognitive process. And
yet what we see is completely different. Both inquiries find something true and significant,
but what they find is not at all the same. In short, the mind of the child behaves causally and it
behaves non-causally at the same time.
Let’s return to the case of a moral decision and consider how we go about it. When any
of us is comparing the options and weighing the pros and cons of the impending choice, it is
impossible for us to examine ourselves from a causal point of view. All we see is reasons and
cannot see causes. If on the contrary we concentrate on our psychological or physical state of
mind, eg that we are tired, sleepy, angry, eager, indignant, or whatnot, all consideration of
what is right or wrong disappears. All we see is causes and no reasons. We cannot grasp both
aspects of the same process at the same time. Grete Hermann even added that sometimes the
choice before us is so difficult that we have to shift from one point of view to the other. This
process would be analogous to Heisenberg’s cut. Does any of this make sense to you?
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