On the Transcendental Modality in Gustav Fechner’s Daylight Ontology
The mention of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) within philosophical discourse is most frequently constrained to his contributions to psychophysics or the dubious equations of sensation. Yet outside the republican halls of academic psychology, Fechner conducted an altogether different experiment—one not of perceptual thresholds but of metaphysical luminosity. His oeuvre “Zend-Avesta” (1851), though scorned by positivistic purists, reveals a rare metaphysical imaginer whose system stands neither with the Kantian transcendental tradition nor with the Schellingian absolute, but somewhere radiant in-between.
It is within this often-dismissed text that one may find an obscure footpath into what I term Fechner’s doctrine of the transcendental modality—a dyadic reconceptualization of nature not merely as living, but as possessing forms of consciousness that border the divine without demanding theological determinacy. The present essay will examine a subtle yet determinant proposition embedded within the Zend-Avesta: that light, or more properly daylight, functions as a metaphysical substrate for the communicability of consciousness among disparate ontological layers. In doing so, Fechner stretches the bounds of substance dualism until they shimmer in organic unity, yielding a transcendentalism not through mind but through life’s rhythmic subsumption into light.
Fechner’s cosmogonic vision begins not with thought but with relation. For Fechner, the cosmos is ensouled not in its parts but in its connections. Drawing from a proto-panpsychism, he asserts that even seemingly inanimate things (the stone, the cloud) are not merely passive formations of matter, but, in a deeper sense, constituents of a kind of planetary monad whose spirit communicates through gradations of awareness. What holds this vertical plurality together is not the Kantian a priori form of time and space, but the mediation through light—a metaphysical cohesion readerly only through the trope of daylight.
In Fechner’s own words: “Gott rechtfertigt sich in der Natur durch das Licht”—“God justifies Himself in nature through light.”¹ Here one must not mistake this for a symbolic flourish. The daylight in question is neither the Newtonian aggregate of photonic waves nor the Romantic metaphor for moral clarity, but rather something like a primary medium of intersubjective continuity. It is not cognition that unites subject to object, nor intuition that divides them, but a deeper transparency—the luminous condition of being witnessed. This renders light, and specifically diurnal light, a presupposition not of epistemology per se, as in usual transcendental footprints, but of ontological coupling.
This coupling, or what Fechner calls the “day-soul” (Tagesseele), is the ur-form through which consciousness at all levels becomes visible to itself through others. Here the subtlety becomes critical. He does not propose that consciousness arises in daylight, nor that light causes sentience; rather, daylight is the ontological veiling that enables mutual presence without total separation or unification. This suggests, crucially, a transcendental modality—not a modality of logic (possibility, necessity, actuality), but a condition under which appearances can be mutually present without collapsing into solipsism or dispersing into anonymity. The sun, for Fechner, becomes not a god, but a temperament of being—it is the most perfect expositor of the world’s relevance to itself.
The significant detail lies in what this demands for metaphysical structure: the world does not sit inert until approached by perception, nor does it arise solely within mental schematics. Instead, beings are always in relation, but this relation necessitates color, shape, warmth, tone—not as sensory data, but as emanations of the visible. This is perhaps why Fechner compared plants turning toward the sun to the soul turning toward meaning—the heliotropism of flora is a metaphysical longing, an actual reaching toward not light as energy but as countenance.² Light, then, is not appearance but address.
This small shift from appearance to address reveals Fechner’s break from traditional idealisms. For whereas Kant’s sublime is an aesthetic asymptote and Hegel’s spirit a necessity unfolding through contradiction, Fechner’s vision suggests a metaphysics of indirect nearness. That is, consciousness is neither private in interiority nor public in exteriority, but mediated through what each being witnesses in common daylight. The absurdity of light seeing but not thinking is resolved by sensual panpsychism: light is the medium through which particles of mind encounter themselves through others—not through content, but through revelation.
Against the Cartesian dualism that severs matter from mind, and against monisms that collapse variety into indifferent substance, Fechner proposes a plural-monadology, unified not in substance but in attention.³ For what the sun offers, in Fechner’s cosmology, is not heat or gravity, but a paradigm of coherent attending. Each soul—whether human, animal, floral, or planetary—is a specific aperture on the daylight of being, and it is in their mutual dazing communion that a world appears.
Therein lies the subtle turning point: that consciousness unfolds not through rational activity or self-reflection, but through a fidelity to the communality of being seen. In this sense, Fechner’s transcendental modality—a term not of his own coinage but apt for his thought—presents itself as a midden position between mystic immanence and mechanist reductionism. What gives the cosmos its meaningful persistence is not mind, but the day-mind—the consilience made possible only in the hours of shared illumination.
The holy quietude of astronomical dawn, then, is not a silence but a passage of speech more ancient than language. It is the cosmic act of opening. The very mechanics of photosynthesis are, in the Zend-Avesta’s deeper reading, a sacrament: a plant absorbing the sun is a prayer being answered.⁴ That daylight travels from star to cell bespeaks of a metaphysical chain not of causation, but of reciprocal knowing.
In conclusion, this subtle dimension—daylight as the transcendental vector whereby multiple modes of awareness cohere—offers a vital corrective to standard epistemologies. For it is not merely that there is a world and perceivers; it is that, in daytime, the world and perceivers share the same room. Fechner’s genius, so long occluded by the dust of psychometric reception, is to have offered a metaphysics of this shared room, flooded not with truth but with transparency.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
light, transcendentalism, panpsychism, metaphysics, phenomenology, poetic ontology, Fechner
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¹ Fechner, G. T. (1851). Zend-Avesta: Oder Über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits. Leipzig: Verlag von Leopold Voss, p. 92.
² Ibid, p. 117.
³ For an analysis of Fechner’s departure from both Spinozist and Cartesian paradigms, see Skrbina, D. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
⁴ See also Merchant, C. (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, for a critical ecological reflection on vegetal metaphysics.