Georg Friedrich Meier: Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason

Both Georg Friedrich Meier’s Doctrine of Reason and its abridgement, the Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, appeared in 1752. Akin to other logic texts of the time, they do not merely elaborate upon the formal aspects of logic, but rather systematically examine the elements of thought and language that make human understanding possible. Through these texts, Meier investigates quite thoroughly the realms of epistemic, aesthetic, and historic cognition. They, thus contain numerous expositions pertaining to the theory of knowledge, aesthetics, poetics, hermeneutics and anthropology. They, moreover, also concern the nature of rhetoric, which is defined at the beginning of both books as “a science, which deals with the rules of learned cognition and of learned exposition.” (Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, § 1, 1). One fundamental question shaped the whole of Meier’s philosophical agenda, namely, what is the “plan of the effectiveness of reason?” (Doctrine of Reason, § 5, 6). We may understand this question also “how do we recognize what is true?” This is a question that guided all his works dedicated to speculative philosophy, and we may contrast his approach to this question from those of other philosophers.Locke and Leibniz, for example, distinguished between truths “in a strict sense” and “moral” or “metaphysical” truths. Wolff had asserted the need to distinguish between a theoretical and a practical part of logic – the former concerned with the objective and systematic foundation of science, the latter with the habits we form after we know the causes and relations of things. By extending the scope of logic beyond dogmatic truths to historical, and aesthetic truths (Doctrine of Reason, § 133-35, 147-52; Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, § 104-06, 26-27), Meier overcame the strict demarcation between logic and rhetoric legitimated by a rigorously formal concept of truth, choosing instead to work on epistemic truths. According to Meier, human beings are sure of the world’s actuality because they live in it. However, they are also conscious of the fact that they know according to their own limitations, i.e., they are aware that they know their own subjective worlds. Meier chiefly considered the subjective side of cognition and the construction of certainty as the result of a cognitive process. Only after having gained certainty is one allowed to speak about truth. But it is always a truth affected by its origin: a given truth might be universal and necessary, but it might also be merely probable, doxastic, or even simply a belief. Meier and Kant, however, had different opinions on this issue. Meier considers the illusion that human cognition might be “completely false” as due to the effect of prejudice; this is the case, e.g., with regard to the partiality of people involved in a heated discussion about some doctrinal issue (Doctrine of Reason, § 128, 140-42; Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, § 100, 25). Kant, however, argues, from a transcendental standpoint, remarking that the assumption of the possibility of a total mistake would put into question the very cognitive capacity of the human being, thus striking back with the legitimation of a transcendental foundation of cognition (Critique of Pure Reason, A294/B350).