James Ferrier's Idealism

A forgotten St Andrews philosopher, and why the senses are faculties of nonsense

Edinburgh and Scottish Dogma

I’ve written elsewhere about James Ferrier, a great and largely forgotten Chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews from 1845-64.

I take a silly pleasure in the thought that I walk the same streets and lecture in the same halls as such a figure, who earned a small bit of notoriety when he was passed up for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1852.

As Ferrier saw it, he was rejected on account of the unconventionality of his philosophical views. Ferrier gave his side of the story in his pamphlet, Scottish Philosophy: The Old and the New. He saw himself as a martyr to “the cause of the absolute independence of speculative thinking, in opposition to the restrictive dogma laid down, and acted on, by the Town Council of Edinburgh” (6). What is interesting about this story is the dogma Ferrier challenged. When you read the word “dogma” about the mid-nineteenth-century you are prone to think of the divinity of Christ or the presence in the Eucharist. What Ferrier dared to challenge, by contrast, was the accepted dogma of common sense; in his words again:

It is well to know that a candidate for a philosophical chair in the University of Edinburgh need not now be a believer in Christ or a member of the Established Church; but he must be a believer in Dr Reid, and a pledged disciple of the Hamiltonian system of philosophy (7),

that is to say, really, to the blandest articulation of “common sense” realism—the doctrine that we know about the world by observing it, and its objects are pretty much what we observe.

This might be the correct philosophy, and there is nothing wrong with arguing for it or teaching it. The problem is setting up an incentive against challenging it. Every useful discovery challenges something that common sense had previously established to be obviously true. The mysteries of the faith are much less dangerous as dogmas than ordinary common sense. The former will inevitably sit uncomfortably with those forced to accept them, who will go on questioning and ruminating in silence. The latter risk dulling the population into comfortable acceptance. A dogma can’t be exciting if it is to provoke a dogmatic slumber: you are at the greatest risk of quitting forever the adventure of thinking when what you are told to accept as obviously right seems obviously right.

Ferrier challenged what might have begun as a progressive escape from barbarous superstition but ended as a soporific conventionality; he ruffled some Whigs. There was also an intimation that his failure to adhere to dogma was treasonous—a surrender of homely Scottish thinking to exotic, dangerous, foreign (especially Germanic) interests. The Edinburgh Town Council thought that Hegel had got to him.

What was the scandalously unconventional and supposedly un-Scottish philosophy that banished Ferrier to the wild Fife coast? The mature expression of his system is found in his Institutes of Metaphysic, first published in 1856. Here Ferrier is at great pains to prove how different he was to those Germans with which he had been associated. Kant and Hegel were, in his words, “painfully deficient in the accomplishment of intelligible speech” (96). To mark the difference, Ferrier was determined to write clear arguments in plain, Scottish prose (perhaps to demonstrate his patriotism, he refers to Hegel’s philosophy as bread from which the whisky of wisdom can only be distilled with great difficulty).

Ferrier and “The Gem”

When I started reading the Institutes I thought that Ferrier’s argument for idealism was a version of “the Gem”, defended in my previous post. Ferrier’s starting assumption, from which he proves everything else, is this proposition:

Along with whatever any intelligence knows, it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself.

From this, he extracts the proposition that the minimum knowable object of the mind—the smallest unit of possible cognition—is the mind’s self plus an object, or, as he calls it, the “object mecum” of the mind. This is hardly enough for idealism: it proves only that if an object is known, it is known alongside the mind knowing it. But Ferrier’s ultimate view is that at object unknown by a mind is inconceivable: we cannot think of such an object, either as what we know or as what we are ignorant of. And so there cannot be any such object: everything that exists is an object being known by some mind—there are no mind-independent objects (nor are there any minds not engaged in knowing some object or other).

If the Gem lurks in Ferrier’s system, it hides in this first assumption. Why would we grant that no intelligence can know an object without knowing itself? John Laird’s A Study in Realism doesn’t even mention Ferrier by name, but it dismisses his assumption in a single sentence: “The primary function of consciousness is to refer beyond itself, and for the most part consciousness fulfils this function without any arrière pensée towards the self” (153-4). By then it was 1920, and an aggressively deployed French phrase had been widely accepted as a substitute for argument. Ferrier, of course, did not argue for his own assumption, but did he perhaps balance it on a hidden Gem?

The hidden Gem would go something like this. Try to think of an object independent of your knowledge. As soon as it is pointed out to you, you cannot deny that you are, in fact, knowing this object, and so your mind is after all aware of itself alongside the object. This will hold no matter what object you attempt to think of without thinking of yourself. The Gem works to unseat the defender of unknown objects by asking her to provide an example and then showing that she must in fact know the object to be offering it as an example, and this is contrary to her hypothesis.

Ferrier writes a few things that make it seem like this sort of argument is what he has in mind. But later it becomes clear that he can’t mean this. Ferrier finds no inconceivability in the possibility that some other mind is thinking of an object that he is not thinking of (Institutes, Part I, Proposition XIII). He admits that when we imagine this possibility, we think of some object and then imagine that we are not thinking of it—that only some other subject is thinking of it. If we can do this, then there is no fatal contradiction involved in imagining that we are not thinking of some object, which we are in fact thinking of. But if there is no contradiction in that then what is the contradiction involved in imagining an object that nobody is thinking of?

The Sensible World as Nonsense

Ferrier gives various hints as to what the contradiction is, all of which come in the form of a commentary on Ancient philosophy, which runs along in his text like an underground stream. This underground stream is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing in this forgotten classic. When outlining his very first assumption, Ferrier writes that it “is merely a higher generalisation and clearer expression of the Pythagorean law of number”. He goes on:

Whatever is to be known must be known as one, or as many, or as both; but whatever is to be known can be made one only by being referred to one self; and whatever is to be known can be made many only when each of the plurals has been made one by being referred to one self (94).

Here is a pattern of argument that seems to me Leibnizian. If I say that this stone exists, even when nobody knows it, how many objects are there when nobody is knowing them? One stone, or two halves of a stone fused together, or three thirds of a stone, or myriad particles, or somewhat less myriad particle-pairs, or…? Without a mind to classify and bring items under some scheme of descriptions, no answer is very satisfying. There is neither a unity nor a plurality. To say that every possible described object and plurality of such objects exists is to overload reality with a superabundance of fragmented and gerrymandered objects (the fusion of 1/627th of a stone and 1/728th of an elephant’s tusk), not to mention every possible grouping of them. To say that only some exist is to endow nature with what is quite obviously an artefact of the mind’s faculty of categorising and describing—the “joints” that Plato imagined mysteriously preexisting in the beast of nature before mind and language begin their butchery.

As soon as Ferrier raises it, this thought disappears underground again, only to resurface in the discussion of the intellect versus the senses (Part I, Proposition X). The senses, Ferrier admits, do not yield knowledge of the mind accompanying its objects; they present only the objects. Do they, therefore, provide empirical refutation of his very first assumption, showing that we do in fact know objects independent of our mind? No, says Ferrier, for what the senses yield is not knowledge at all; it is nothing intelligible at all; they are “faculties of nonsense”. Here is the blow against Reid and Hamilton, which the Town Council of Edinburgh were not willing to abide.

Here also Ferrier’s commentary on Ancient philosophy resurfaces. The true aim of “the early Greek metaphysic, in so far as it was of an epistemological character, was the explanation of the conversion of the unintelligible into the intelligible” (264). What the senses provide is unintelligible; it is converted into the intelligible by the intellect, which adds to their data the presence of the mind knowing their objects, classifying and unifying the nonsense into an conceivable order of distinct items. Plato, according to Ferrier, had fixed “Sense as the faculty of the contradictory, the faculty of nonsense (δύναμις τοῦ ἀλόγου).” From his earliest interpreters on, Plato has been taken to have presented two domains of objects of knowledge—the world of changeable, sensible things, and the world of fixed, intelligible things.

This thought has rendered Plato’s philosophy both excessively mystical and excessively materialist: excessively mystical for positing a mysterious realm of νοήτα, which set “the whole philosophical world” off “hunting, day and night, after these elusory phantoms through eighty generations of men” (277), and excessively materialistic for proposing a material world accessible to the mere senses, when in fact the world as apprehended by the senses, without the assistance of the intellect, “is reduced to the predicament of a contradiction, and banished to the purgatory of nonsense” (279). Ferrier offers the corrective:

Understand by Plato’s sensible world (τὸ αἰσθητόν, τὸ ἀλογον, τὸ ἀνοήτον, τὸ γιγνόμενον) the absolutely incomprehensible and contradictory, and understand by his intelligible or real world (τὸ ὄντως ὄν) the sensible world as we now actually behold it [i.e., as always accompanied by a mind to give it number and order], and his whole philosophy becomes luminous and plain (279).

“These remarks”, he concludes, “supply a key, and the only key, to the entire philosophy of ancient Greece. This key, however, seems to have been mislaid until now” (280).

Well, that is quite a claim. But at any rate I hope have done a bit to show that Ferrier is both a lot less “deficient in the accomplishment of intelligible speech” than the German idealists and a lot less boring than the Scottish realists.

One of my undergraduate lectures once commented on the forking path we Honours students were then facing between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy: “You have to ask yourself if you’d rather be baffled or bored”. Ferrier is a wonderful example of a middle path.

Edinburgh didn’t want the middle path; St Andrews was willing to venture it; long may this pattern hold.