Reflection means a form of thoughtful and comparative thinking. Different types of reflection can be distinguished.
On the one hand, there is self-reflection, i.e. thinking about oneself or one's own behavior. The corresponding verb is reflect and stands for to ponder, think through or contemplate.
In philosophy, there have also been subject-specific uses of the concept since the 17th century, which are based on this concept and emphasize different aspects. For example, reflection on social relations or the use of language.
The central concern is the distinction between perception aimed at external objects and the kind of mental activity that reflects on the acts of thinking and representation themselves (abstraction).
Ancient and modern foundations A “knowledge of knowledge” (ἐπιστήμης ἐπιστήμη, Episteme) is already mentioned by Plato (Charmides 171c), Aristotle calls it the “thinking of thinking” in the context of a discussion of Eudaimonia, which for him arises from intellectual activity in general:
“now if he who sees perceives that he sees, and hears that he hears, and as one who walks perceives that he walks, and if in everything else there is likewise a perception that we are active, so that we thus perceive that we perceive, and think that we think: and that we perceive and think is a sign to us that we are (...)”.Aristoteles: Nicomachean Ethics IX 9, 1170a28ff.; cf. also with Posterior Analytics 87b and De Anima 429a–433a.
Finally, the return of the spirit to itself, epistrophé in Greek, becomes a central concept in Neoplatonism, especially in Proclus. In the Middle Ages, epistrophé was initially translated as reditio, return, or conversio, conversion. However, Thomas Aquinas also used reflexio.Thomas Aquinas, De veritate I 9.
Following Descartes' mirror metaphors, numerous controversial theories of reflection emerged. Nevertheless, 'the definition of Leibniz — La réflexion n'est autre chose qu'une attention à ce qui est en nous'Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, Préf. (Darmstadt 1959, XVI). (”Reflection is nothing but attention to what is within us“) would likely have been accepted as a common view within the Cartesian tradition up to Husserl. These foundations gave rise to distinctions that increasingly differentiated “reflection” from the prevailing psychological notion of introspection.
John Locke
After reflection in English and réflexion in French had become established as colloquial terms in the 17th century, John Locke's treatment of reflection in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) became decisive for further philosophical debates on the subject. Locke distinguishes between the perception of external objects and the perception of processes in our own souls such as “perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing”, including the associated feelings of “satisfaction or dissatisfaction”:
And such are perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings of our own minds;—which we being conscious of, and observing in ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called INTERNAL SENSE. But as I call the other Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.
It remains unclear whether reflection should be seen as dependent on external perception or as an independent source of knowledge, since Locke — drawing on Descartes, who, admittedly, did not yet use the term 'reflection' — also asserts that reflection is an independent source of knowledge.
The concept of reflection in the Enlightenment
For Immanuel Kant and his transcendental philosophy, reflection was an essential means of cognition and knowledge, emphasizing the role of the associated concepts and their necessary distinction, cf. → critical philosophy. By tracing these activities back to the thinker's own ego, he also named them with his own ‘concepts of reflection’ (Reflexionsbegriffen), namely unity and difference, attunement and conflict, the inner and the outer, matter and form (CPR B 316 ff.). Reference should also be made here to the amphiboly of concepts of reflection (CPR B 326).
The idea that reflection means a loss of immediacy is first found in François Fénelon and was propagated above all by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The state of reflection is a state against Nature.” A well-known literary treatment of this theme is Heinrich von Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater, which states:
“We see that to the extent that reflection becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, grace emerges ever more radiant and dominant.”
Johann Gottfried Herder pointed out that reflection is dependent on language: only language makes it possible to capture individual moments in an “ocean of sensations” on which the mind can reflect. As people drew on what they had already achieved in the past, which they expanded and improved, Herder ultimately saw spiritual history (Geistesgeschichte) as a “supra-individual context of reflection”.
Kant and German idealism Immanuel Kant deals with the concepts of reflection of his predecessors in an appendix to the transcendental analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Here he speaks of amphiboly,Anhang. Von der Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe durch die Verwechslung des empirischen Verstandesgebrauchs mit dem transzendentalen, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B 316–346 i.e. the ambiguity of these concepts of reflection, since they either “abstract from all conditions of contemplation (...) so, of course, nothing remains for us in the mere concept but the interior in general” (B 339, 341); or the concepts of understanding are completely “sensibilized”, so that one can only determine their difference and their contradiction. The former was Leibniz's mistake, the latter Locke's (B 327). He therefore calls for a transcendental reflection, through which it must first be determined whether concepts “are compared with one another as belonging to pure understanding or to sensory perception” (B 317) - he calls it transcendental, because it “identifies the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts” and “does not have to do with the objects themselves” from which the concepts are to be obtained (B 316).
In his Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, Johann Gottlieb Fichte distinguishes between “reflection” and ‘striving’ as the two fundamental activities of the “absolute I”.Grundlegung der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794) III, § 5 ff. At a first stage, they bring about the “I-ness” as an “activity that goes back into itself and determines itself”.Grundlegung des Naturrechts (1796) Through further “free reflection”, what is initially still connected is separated and “absorbed into a new form, the form of knowledge or consciousness”Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (1794) II, § 7 whereby reflection becomes the “being for itself of knowledge”,Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1801) which, however, can never fully realize its ground, namely its freedom and unity. The “essential basic law of reflection” is that knowledge always retains the form of “that and that”, which leads to the fact that “reflection on reflection” always makes “the world appear in a new form”.Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806) The connection between reflection and immediacy is accessible in love, which for Fichte is defined as the “reflection that purely destroys itself in God”.
For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the “sphere of reflection and separation” is characteristic of man,Philosophie und Religion (1804) but at the same time signifies “a spiritual illness”.Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) However, since this determines modern consciousness primarily through Christianity as a “separation of the infinite and the finite”, it must be dealt with. Schelling undertakes this in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), in which “free reflection” is given the task of bringing the ego to an awareness of itself as standing opposite the mere organism. Reflection is “analytical”, but refers to a prior “synthetic intuition” in which the contemplating and the contemplated are identical.
Schelling criticizes Fichte for never escaping "the circle of consciousness" with his positing of the I through the I, thus failing to reach the independently given objects of nature.Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie (1801) However, it is difficult to spare Schelling himself from this same reproach.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel defines modern philosophy in an essay from 1802 as the "philosophy of reflection of subjectivity," but criticizes that in the works of his predecessors, the separation between finite consciousness and an empty Absolute always remains. He developed his own conception of reflection in the Science of Logic (1812–1816) and in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (from 1816).
Hegel distinguishes between “being” as pure immediacy and ‘essence’, whose “own determination” is reflection.Enzyklopädie § 112 Reflection “posits” the identity of essence, thereby presupposing being on the one hand, but at the same time “positing” it itself. The “positing reflection” is therefore accompanied by an ‘external’ reflection that negates the posited being, precisely because it is posited by the reflection, whereby it is “the abolition of this positing of it” and “in negating it negates this negating of it”.Wissenschaft der Logik Finally, the “determining reflection” shows that posited and external reflection are one, because the latter is nothing but the “immanent reflection of immediacy itself”.Enzyklopädie § 112 This results in identity, difference and contradiction as “reflection determinations”, whereby reflection “perishes” in the latter, in the double sense of the expression. The “infinite reflection” leads from “essence”, which has the character of a ‘substance’, to the purely subjective “concept” as the third stage of development of Hegel's logic. In the sphere of the concept, reflection, which until then had only constituted the “movement” from being to essence, “articulates” itself as judgment and resolution.Enzyklopädie § 112
From this “reflection in general”, Hegel distinguishes the “reflection of consciousness”, which he developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806), and the “more specific reflection of the understanding”, which discusses the conditions of perception from various points of view.Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion Within the overall process of his philosophy, which describes the coming of the Absolute, he also identifies the being and consciousness of the individual human being as a “stage of reflection”.Enzyklopädie § 413
Phenomenology and existentialism
According to Hegel, Jakob Friedrich Fries traced reflection back to “direct knowledge of reason” on the one hand, while on the other he defined it empirically as a faculty of “inner self-observation”. As a result, the tendency towards a “psychologistic” approach, in which reflection itself was treated as an empirical object, intensified. In contrast, Franz Brentano emphasized that “inner perception ... can never become inner observation”, but merely accompanies the observations. Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was based on this insight: