Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843)

The most important contribution of Jakob Fries to the Kantian tradition is his theory of justification and the manner in which he addresses the paradoxes of Immanuel Kant's "Transcendental Deduction" in the Critique of Pure Reason. The Friesian theory of justification may be found in the essay The Foundations of Value, Part II, Epistemological Issues: Justification (quid juris) and Non-Intuitive Immediate Knowledge. Here I will note how Fries specifically responds to Kant.

The greatest paradox of Kant's Transcendental Deduction in the Critique was how it was possible to certify or verify the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge when this must be done with arguments that will rest on premises that either are (1) synthetic a priori themselves, which would beg the question, or are (2) synthetic a posteriori and empirical, which would give us only empirical certainty for presumably non-empirical matters, reducing synthetic a priori knowledge to an a posteriori matter after all. The possibility that the premises could be analytic would not, and should not, have been seriously considered by either Kant or Fries, although that would have been the standard, traditional Rationalistic approach, as in Leibniz. We may say that it was Hume who had eliminated that kind of appeal (what he called truths based on "relations of ideas").

While Hegel (who agreed with Leibniz about analyticity) and others concluded that this dilemma rendered Kant's argument ineffective, circular, or unnecessary, Fries solved the problem with a distinction that is now commonplace but is still rarely noted by those who have bothered to address Fries' system: the distinction between object language and meta-language. Thus, Fries would say that the object languages of metaphysics, ethics, etc., whose first principles would consist of synthetic a priori propositions, which in the case of ethics would also be propositions of value (with "ought") rather than propositions of fact (with "is"), are logically distinct from the meta-language description of them which is the actual content of Kant's "critique." Thus "critique" itself can be empirical a posteriori without this affecting in any way the a priori status of the object languages. Since "first principles," by Aristotle's own definition, cannot be proven anyway, we cannot understand Kantian "critique" to offer in any logically familiar sense a proof of synthetic a priori first principles. More detail on justification in this sense may be found in the essay cited above.

Because Fries thought that the empirical and a posteriori critique was psychological in nature, it became commonplace to accuse him of what was called "psychologism," which we may take to be the doctrine that human knowledge merely reflects the forms of the human mind, the structures that the human psyche imposes upon the world. This accusation entirely failed to take into account the distinction between object language and meta-language, where the psychological, or whatever, nature of the critique would not affect in the slightest the objective character of the object languages. So far, only Leonard Nelson has properly understood the implications and success of Fries' theory. Even Karl Popper, otherwise an understanding and sympathetic commentator on Fries, produces his own mistaken accusation of "psychologism."

Without Fries' evaluation of Kant, a proper understanding of Kant's system and approach has not progressed much in mainstream philosophy in nearly two centuries.

Fries occasionally comes in for note because of his political activities. These present us with a very mixed bag, at once admirable and horrifying. The admirable part was Fries' opposition to the Prussian and Austrian reactionary regimes of the time. When Fichte died in 1814, both Fries and Hegel were proposed to replace him in the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Hegel did not occupy the chair until 1818, but Fries had already been disqualified by his republican and nationalistic activities. In the historical context, German nationalism at the time was seen as liberal, republican, and radical -- a tradition reflected in the black, red, and gold (Schwarzrotgold) flag of the movement being used in the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848, by the Weimar Republic, and by both post-War German Republics. But these tendencies were not agreeable to Austria or Prussia, and Fries endangered himself by conspicuously associating with radical students and the Burschenshaften student fraternities -- which the Encyclopaedia Britannica still describes as "the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft (Young Germany Movement), a liberal, idealistic student association."

Unwelcome in Berlin, Fries was offered the chair of philosophy at Jena, under the tolerant Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar (1775-1828), who had been the first German ruler to grant a written constitution in his domain. Austria and Prussia then became alarmed by the Wartburg Festival of the Burschenschaften in 1817, when, with the participation of 500 students from 12 universities, various symbols of tyranny (e.g. the Code Napoléon and a corporal's cane) and books regarded as reactionary were burned. Then in 1819 one of Fries' students, Karl Sand, assassinated the anti-liberal dramatist, historian, journalist, and (reputed) Russian agent August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. Guided by Metternich, these and similar events were used to close off further liberal and constitutional reforms in Germany. Already under fire from Austria and Prussia for his participation at Wartburg, Fries was finally dismissed from his philosophy chair after the assassination of Kotzebue. Karl August, however, then provided Fries with a chair in physics (1824), a subject Fries had taught previously at Heidelberg. Fries was able to live out his life in such relatively agreeable circumstances, and he was eventually allowed to teach philosophy again (1838).

We get a slightly different perspective on this in a book by Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom, the Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 [Belknap Press, Harvard, 2006]. Clark discusses the Wartburg Festival [pp.378-379] and the assassination of Kotzebue by Sand [pp.399-402] in some detail; but any reference to Jakob Fries is entirely missing from his book. We do hear of professors who were dismissed because of their association with Sand and the Burschenshaften, including the theologian at Berlin, Wilhelm de Wette (a friend of Fries who wrote a sympathetic letter to Sand's mother), and the historian at Bonn, Ernst Moritz Arndt. But the philosopher at Jena, Fries, nothing. This makes it sound like Fries' role was far more peripheral and incidental than either his supporters or his critics have given us to understand. Or perhaps Clark found the man so distasteful that he decided to ignore him. I can't tell. But Clark also gives us a larger picture of resistance to the conservatives than just from the Burschenshaften. The black, red, and gold colors came from one of the groups of "volunteer rangers" (freiwillige Jäger), the Lützow Rangers, who had joined the regular and militia forces in fighting against Napoleon. The rangers were celebrated as free and willing volunteers whose dedication was to Germany, not to Prussia or any particular state. This tended to annoy the authorities, who wanted the war seen in terms of authority, not as a spontaneous uprising of the people. Just such a popular upwelling, however, was promoted, not just by the Burschenshaften, but also by the Turnbewegung, the "gymnasts' movement," founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in 1811. Physical health was the flip side of citizen volunteers for Jahn. In the aftermath of the Kotzebue assassination, Jahn was arrested, his gymnastic societies were closed, and he was subsequently imprisoned. This was much harsher treatment than what Fries and the other academics received. Also arrested was a noble military supporter of Jahn, Hans Rudolf von Plehwe. This man introduced jogging, which really only came into general vogue, of course, in the 1970's. Von Plehwe had been at Wartburg and was arrested after participating in a rally in support of Jahn. But by the time Sand was executed (by decapitation), Clark says that he had become a "celebrity" -- regarded rather like the Japanese assassins of the 1920's & '30's. Indeed, like them, Sand made an attempt at suicide immediately after the assassination, to show, like them, his sincerity. Later, the executioner himself is supposed to have dismantled the blood-stained scaffold and built a shrine for "pilgrims who had come to honour the memory of the dead patriot" [p.401]. Thus, all of this was a public spectacle and sensation that displayed little contribution from Jakob Fries.

Clark's treatment gives us a bit more perspective on the politics of which Fries was a part, but it also leaves the impression that Fries was not one of the most conspicuous leaders or principals of the republican movement. Sand may have been one of Fries' students; but, dressed in clothes of the Turnbewegung, the influences on his behavior went far beyond any ideas, unique exhortations, or involvement from Fries. However, Clark does disappoint by not including Fries in his treatment; and one would like to see some discussion about whether Kotzebue really was anything like a Russian agent, as had been the accusation. Clark explains Sand's antipathy for Kotzebue only in terms of the purported "effeminacy" of his plays, and of his publicly stated contempt for the Burschenshaften. It is hard to know from this why Sand should have singled out Kotzebue from all the reactionaries whom he might have targeted. It seems like a Prussian minister would have been more to the point.

Admirable and progressive as the republican movement, apart from the celebration of the Sand, may make the political commitments of Jakob Fries seem, there was a side to it even darker than a fortunately unrepeated assassination. In criticizing Fries, Shlomo Avineri [Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge University Press, 1972, pp. 119-122], has correctly pointed out that German nationalism was already displaying some of its worst tendencies, including the book burning at the Wartburg Festival, and anti-Semitism -- with Fries himself contributing an infamous and disgraceful anti-Semitic tract. The horrifying overtones of this led Avineri to dismiss Fries and the Burschenschaften, not as "liberal, idealistic," but as proto-Nazis; and he attributed the affinity between them all to the subjectivism and irrationality of Fries' thought. This repetition of Hegel's own charge is nonsense when applied to Fries. There was actually nothing particularly rational about Hegel's obscurantism and speculative dogmatism, whatever he called it; and Hegel's view of Fries' (and Kant's) system as subjectivist, however consistent it was with the Romantic and foolish overtones of German culture at the time (from which get Sturm und Drang), is ridiculous. In taking Hegel's conception of "reason" and "rationality" seriously, Avineri is clearly an apologist for Hegel, willing to uncritically promote Hegel's own technical and tendentious characterization of his opponents.

Politically, there is certainly enough blame to go around. The mix of ideas found later in National Socialism owes as much to Hegel as to the evils advocated or practiced by Fries and the Burschenschaften. From the Neoplatonic (and perhaps Aristotelian) doctrine that God only knows universals, Hegel produced the modern totalitarian idea of the state, where the individual as such is "abstract" and irrational -- only the State, as the historical expression of Geist, "spirit" or "mind," is real and rational. While Hegel apologists often deny that Hegel's theory was of this sort, my impression is that, when the chips are down, the apologists themselves turn out to be collectivists and statists, with little sympathy for "bourgeois" individualism or classical liberalism. Certainly, Hegel's doctrine was agreeable and conformable to the attitude and practice of the Kingdom of Prussia; and Hegel's Philosophy of Right of 1821 was widely regarded, by everyone from Schopenhauer to Marx, as Hegel's justification and rationalization for the regime whose employee, spokesman, and apologist he had become. The same regime, thus promoted, later co-opted German nationalism for its own purposes, grafting onto the same horrifying tendencies of German nationalism all the unlimited power and absolute authority of Hegel's Geist. This separated Republican Schwarzrotgold from the Nationalistic Schwarzweißrot (black, white, and red -- the colors of the German Empire and Nazi Germany). At first anti-Semitism was subdued, but it was a bad sign that Kaiser Wilhelm II's Kaiserin simply refused to visit Wilhelm's Jewish friends. The new element into the mix was later the anti-Semitism of Marx himself, for whom Jews now were class enemies, symbolic and more, of Capitalist exploitation.

The worse secret of the Twentieth Century is how the hellish payoff of all this was on both the political Left and the political Right. Where for Hitler the "plutocrat" Jews were rather more important as race enemies than as class enemies, Stalin's policies, beginning with class enemies, insensibly shaded over into racial interpretations also. The "Jewish doctors' plot" was the telling culmination of Stalin's career. Most importantly, both Hitler and Stalin, like Hegel's Geist, only knew people as universals -- as classes or races -- to be impersonally lauded or exterminated. True liberal principles of individual liberty have been steadily ground down, even in the democracies, between the statist millstones of Left and Right.

Neither in Fries' era nor in the 20th century can anti-Semitism as such be taken as a clue to either rightist or leftist political affinities. As Paul Johnson says in his A History of the Jews [HarperPerennial, 1987]:

On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portray the Jews as the allies and instigators of anarchy. Both could not be true. Neither was true. But both were believed. [p. 309]

Johnson's reference to Voltaire included a citation from his Dictionnaire philosophique [1756]:

Their [i.e. the Jews] residence in Babylon and Alexandria, which allowed individuals to acquire wisdom and knowledge, only trained the people as a whole in the art of usury ... they are a totally ignorant nation who for many years have combined contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all those nations which have tolerated them." [Voltaire, quoted by Johnson, p. 309]

So if Fries was simply anti-Semitic, this means all his thought is just (and justly) discredited? Right? Well, anti-Semitism, while repellent in Fries or anyone, tends to be excused or ignored when found in those who are more politically favored or fashionable, or where the rest of their ideas are regarded as worthy in themselves and unrelated to attitudes towards the Jews. Thus, anti-Semitism expressed or practiced by Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Gottlob Frege, or Martin Heidegger is therefore hardly even noticed by their advocates, even though Heidegger was actually a member of the Nazi Party and a functionary of the Nazi regime, and even though Marx provided the "dialectical" justification for even contemporary leftist anti-Semitism, as found for instance in Louis Farrakhan or in both crude and more sophisticated (i.e. dissimulating) forms of Islamic Fascism. Since Nietzsche had a great many harsh things to say about the Jews, in books that are commonly read, a small industry has grown up to defend him. Nietzsche's theory that the distortion of morality into a mechanism for protecting the weak was the result of the vindictive hatred conceived by the Jews for the "noble races" who conquered them, however, would seem at once to discredit him as a moralist and simultaneously to convict him as an anti-Semite. If the excuse for Voltaire or Marx or Frege or Heidegger is that the rest of their thought is too important or edifying to be dismissed because of one reprehensible viewpoint, then Hegelian apologists like Avineri are certainly not justified in using the same failing to tar and dismiss Fries' thought as a whole. The only substantive claim is that Fries' anti-Semitism followed from the "irrationality" of his thought, but this is a charge as well directed against Hegel himself, and most excellently made against Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Unlike Karl Popper, I do not think that Heidegger should be shunned just because of his moral and political failings. There are some interesting, albeit limited, ideas there. The same with Nietzsche -- and even Hegel with his proto-totalitarianism must be addressed. By the same token, Fries' thought should be evaluated as a whole. But, unlike apologists for Nietzsche or Heidegger, I see no point in trying to deny that he was an anti-Semite. As it happens, when I met Paul Branton in 1984 and asked him, as I had once been asked, about Fries' anti-Semitism, he sputted in outrage. This from a man who fled Hitler's Austria to Palestine, who witnessed the Arab Revolt of 1936, and who joined the Royal Navy to fight Germany during World War II -- incongruously carrying around a copy of Leonard Nelson's Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, a practice that must have looked very odd to his fellow sailors. Although Branton may have had before his mind the sterling anti-Nazis qualities of Nelson's circle, he did not actually meet any of them until after the War. Thus, it was the ideas that attracted him, and in reading Nelson he found no hint, and had no thought, of Fries' attitude toward the Jews.

The fundamental question to ask is how an expression of anti-Semitism relates, indeed, to the rest of a philosopher's thought. Anti-Semitism as a form of racist ideology was essential to the political theory of the Nazis; yet such racism seemed to be missing in Heidegger (which is what I thought until recently; but now see the revelations of Emmanuel Faye) and also in Fries -- especially since such ideology didn't exist yet in the early 19th century. It is not missing in Nietzsche, who freely uses expressions like die Herren Rasse, the "Master Race," or "Race of Masters." If anti-Semitism occurs, as in Marx, because of envy, distaste, misunderstanding, and hatred of successful middleman economic minorities, just as Chinese were hated in Indonesia, Indians in Uganda, Lebanese in Ghana, Japanese in California, or Koreans in Harlem, then the problem is clearly originally one of hatred and misunderstanding of capitalism and the conditions for economic success, and not just some atavistic expression of ethnocentrism and racism. The recent (Fall 2011) "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations, with their anti-capitalist agenda, have featured their share of diatribes against Jews and Zionists for the evils of banking and finance. Few ethnic groups, whether successful or unsuccessful, get attacked, robbed, or murdered without some element of envy or perceived economic threat involved. Such ethnic hatreds will be certain to continue as long as economically successful minorities are regarded as prospering because of dishonesty or exploitation, or even unsuccessful groups are regarded as illegitimately absorbing wealth that somehow collectively belongs to some other group. The fault, indeed, is again Hegelian: the reification of a universal, a group, into the legitimate possessor of rights and liberties. Since tens of millions of people have been murdered in the Twentieth Century on this principle, whether applied in racial or class terms, the historical guilt of Fries, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger can only truly be assessed in terms of whether or how they contributed to the formulation or application of that principle. In that light, the final word must be that it was the metaphysical and moral individualism of Kant and Fries that Hegel, like his spiritual descendants, found the most objectionable.

The anti-Semitism of Right and Left comes down to the same hatred: the hatred of capitalism and liberty. To the political Right, capitalism represents, like the Jews themselves, a threat to the customs and hierarchy of traditional Christian (or Moslem, etc.) society. Commercial culture frees individuals from ancient restraints, producing "vulgar" popular enjoyments and non-conforming individual behavior. To the political Left, capitalism represents a threat to the ideological social engineering, Utopianism, and Mandarinism that really is the content of a leftist political program. A commercial culture that frees individuals does not ensure that they will conform to ideologically sound ("politically correct"), edifying activities.

Since a political Mandarinism is rather like the status of learned scholars in the Mediaeval Jewish (or Moslem, for that matter) tradition, many Jews have curiously been attracted to political programs whose promotion of state power and whose attacks on private property and individual liberty are inevitably turned upon the Jews themselves, whose own economic success and status are always due to the limitation of state power and the protection of private property and individual liberty. Thus, for the Right, Jews represent the threat of radical innovation, while for the Left they represent the threat of opposition to radical innovation, as derived from individualism and privacy. For Jews themselves, Jewish tradition, itself formulated long before the existence of capitalism or liberal democracy, sadly often motivates attacks upon the very principles of limited government and individual liberty and property that protect Jews from the envy, ill will, and Utopian manipulations of others. Thus, American Jews are said to earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. This is neither good for the Jews nor, as it happens, morally right. For instance, after I had a letter published in the Los Angeles Times criticizing the "health care" proposals of the Clinton Administration, I received a telephone call from a doctor who quoted the Bible and Jewish Tradition to me about how we had to take care of everyone. That socialism and absolutist government were not going to be effective or appropriate ways to take care of everyone did not seem persuasive to him. Nor had he remembered that Jewish charity could never be coerced in the Mediaeval circumstances of the Jewish community -- escape was always available to the surrounding Christian or Muslim socities.

How Fries would have taken to later events is a question that cannot be answered. Whether he would have gone ahead with Bismarkian nationalism (Schwarzweißrot) and its apocalyptic future or moved toward a more properly liberal stand (Schwarzrotgold), we can never know. What we can see instead is Leonard Nelson's career, which was forthrightly internationalist and socialist. Unfortunately, Nelson thereby errs in the opposite direction, with a leftist rather than a rightist impatience with liberal principles and the individualistic free market. That Nelson was not tempted by anti-Semitic rhetoric is a tribute to his good sense, but there would have been nothing particularly inconsistent or surprising if his Leftist sympathies had happened to propel him in that direction. In the Kant-Friesian tradition, therefore, we must wait for a mature and appropriate political philosophy until Popper and Hayek.

Biography, Publications, and Book Prospectus of Dr. Kay Herrmann, with Jakob Fries Page.

Dr. Kay Herrmann, in German

Dr. Kay Herrmann, in English

Nelson's Proof of the Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge, Dr. Kay Herrmann, 2011

History of Philosophy

Epistemology

Philosophy of Religion

Fries on Home Page

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2011 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), Note

Frege is one of the most important figures in the history of logic, and I had an entire seminar on him with Irving Copi at the University of Hawaii in 1973. But Frege's anti-Semitism only just came to my attention in 1998, in Tom Rockmore's On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy [U. California Press, 1997]. Rockmore refers to "Frege's well-known, vicious anti-Semitism" [p. 40]; but it must not be all that well known, since neither Copi nor any other philosopher or logician I've ever met bothered to mention it. It is anti-Semitism of a particularly disturbing sort since Frege, although he died in 1925 and so had no clue about the later triumph of the Nazis (though he was for them at the time), was already advocating in 1924 that racial laws should require Jews to wear something to distinguish them as Jews [p. 311-312] -- like the yellow star later used by Hitler -- a device not uncommon in the Middle Ages, in Christendom and Islâm, that Fries had himself advocated.

This is a good case for the discussion about Fries, since it would be hard to blame logic for Frege's anti-Semitism (though I'm willing to listen to arguments). At the same time, this also illustrates the fact that logic alone almost always fails to produce sensible views about anything else in logicians themselves.

Frege is also a good case for a phenomenon that occurs in my correspondence:  people who write to me, and are critical of something about Friesian philosophy, and who then threaten to discredit all of it by exposing Fries's anti-Semitism -- expose it with the information that they have learned from the webpages that I have myself posted! There is something odd about that. They are threatening to expose something that I have already exposed? Come again?

But we may then engage in the thought experiment about what it would mean to expose Frege. Clearly, someone like Professor Copi, if he even knew of Frege's anti-Semitism himself, must have felt awkward about teaching a seminar and relying in his discipline on a serious, of not notorious, anti-Semite. Yet, once he may have determined that Frege's political ideas were irrelevant to his logical studies, then he really need not have worried about the matter again.

The case of Fries is rather different, since his philosophy, like Kant's, features a moral teaching, which thus might be discredited by his political views, if the latter can be traced to the former. This is precisely the purport of Hegel's criticism that the moral philosophy of both Kant and Fries is subjective and "irrational." Why the moral philosophy of both Nietzsche and Heidegger should then be given a pass, when both are profoundly and openly irrationalistic, and even be the subject of desperate apologetics, is a little mysterious. The solution, of course, is that there is little about Hegel's dialectic that is genuinely rational, while its moral positivism is fully conformable to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the sort of Statists and totalitarians who ironically and, in the case of Nietzsche, incongruously find comfort in all three.

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