German Idealism as Constructivism

Abstract

Like Rockmore's earlier effort to paint Husserl's phenomenology as cognitive constructivism, this reading of Kant will doubtless raise a red flag for those who specialize in Kant and scientific thinking (such as Michael Friedman, whom Rockmore charges with "looking away from the constructivism featured in the title" of Friedman's own book, Kant's Construction of Nature).

ROCKMORE, Tom. German Idealism as Constructivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $45.00-The jacket copy bills this volume as Tom Rockmore's "definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism." It marks the culmination of Rockmore's efforts over the years (till now little credited in the literature) to persuade students of German idealism that "the philosophical tradition that includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel" is a tradition "best understood as a constructivist project." More than of merely historical significance, this project is, in Rockmore's view, the enduring "legacy of German idealism," which "lives on through cognitive constructivism" in widely diffuse forms across a variety of disciplines.

Constructivism is Rockmore's term of art-"not a theory but a cognitive approach"-which he takes to "refer only to the problem of cognition (das Erkenntnisproblem, from erkennen)." His special concern is thus cognitive constructivism, something he defines in the present work and in earlier books as the idea "that we 'construct' what we know," or (presumably) correlatively, "that we only know what we in some sense construct." Among the exponents of constructivism so conceived, Rockmore at different times has included Hobbes, Vico, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Peirce, Dilthey, Cassirer, Dewey, Rescher, and even Husserl. If Jean Piaget is "perhaps the most distinguished twentieth-centuiy cognitive constructivist," as Rockmore announces in the concluding chapter of this, his latest and definitive contribution to scholarship on the German idealist tradition, one is not surprised to hear that the "constructivist epistemology attracts little attention" in current literature on German idealism and its philosophical legacy.

Whatever form it takes, construction is ultimately based, asserts the author, "on a type of identity-more precisely, a view of identity in difference." The difference in question "lies in the stress on activity- more precisely, the subject's activity as the unity, which is neither subjective nor objective, and which subtends the difference between them." Such identity in difference is, says Rockmore, "neither numerical nor qualitative," but rather "a metaphysical relation brought about by the subject in creating a unity between itself and the object it 'constructs'"- a relation Rockmore interprets as a "metaphysical identity in the difference between the subject that knows and the object that it knows." Rockmore's cognitive construction thesis figures in this metaphysic as follows: "If a minimal condition of knowledge is that the subject must construct the object, then in a sense, in order to be specified, subject and object are both different as well as identical." Whether as "pure unstructured identity" or as "an identity between identity and difference," this sort of Identitätstheorie-cum-constructivism is the core of Rockmore's concern in a series of unevenly developed chapters on Kant, Fichte, Schelling (who "was in a sense never a German idealist"), and, in a chapter longer than the others combined, on Hegel. Rockmore explains that his "approach to German idealism as a series of efforts by different hands to perfect constructivism loosely follows Hegel's view of the German idealist tradition."

The originating genius of German idealism, Kant is for Rockmore by far the most significant cognitive constructivist, something he makes clear in his introduction and in his opening chapter ("Kant, Idealism, and Constructivism"). On Rockmore's telling, "the Kantian account of the construction of the cognitive object . . . turns on the construction of an identity in difference." This view informs his contention that Kant's epistemology "justifies the theoretical claim embodied in the Copemican turn: we know only what we construct." The plausibility of Rockmore's account, both here and through much of the book, hinges on two factors: his construal of the Copemican Revolution and his interpretation of how Kant understood it relative to the revolutionary innovations of the critical idealism. "The Copemican revolution," Rockmore informs us, "is a constructivist approach to cognition, which encompasses mathematics (especially geometry), natural science, and modern theory of knowledge." As for Kant, we learn that he is "implying that the critical philosophy is a form of constructivism" when, in the B preface of the first Critique, he "calls attention to Copemicanism." Rockmore calls "Copemican constructivism ... the central thread of Kant's position as well of the postKantian German reaction to the critical philosophy." Like Rockmore's earlier effort to paint Husserl's phenomenology as cognitive constructivism, this reading of Kant will doubtless raise a red flag for those who specialize in Kant and scientific thinking (such as Michael Friedman, whom Rockmore charges with "looking away from the constructivism featured in the title" of Friedman's own book, Kant's Construction of Nature).

In any case, Rockmore's considered judgment on Kant's achievement- which, he says, "lies in reformulating a powerful constructivist approach to cognition"-is not unequivocal: "Kant, who uses representational language, is apparently unable to decide between representationalism and constructivism." Such indecision is evident, for Rockmore, in the way that, for "the critical philosophy, objectivity takes two incompatible forms: as the mind-independent external object, or thing in itself, as well as the mind-dependent cognitive object of experience and knowledge." Whatever one thinks of this inference and its implications for a constructivist reading of German idealism, Rockmore is certainly justified in his belief that "[i]f the critical philosophy is cognitively constructivist [in his sense], then Kant-who has been studied as much if not more than anyone else in the modern tradition-is paradoxically still not well known."-Phillip Stambovsky, Fairfield University