The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century 9780199696543, 0199696543

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The Oxford Handbook of

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Oxford Handbook of

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Edited by

MICHAEL N. FORSTER and

K R I S T I N GJ E SDA L

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The several contributors 2015 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression:  1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New  York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  2014946221 ISBN 978–0–19–969654–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Contributors

ix

Introduction

1

PH I L O S OPH E R S 1. Fichte (1762–1814) Günter Zöller

11

2. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) Andreas Arndt

26

3. Hegel (1770–1831) Paul Redding

46

4. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) Dalia Nassar

68

5. Schelling (1775–1854) Markus Gabriel

88

6. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Sebastian Gardner

108

7. Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Michelle Kosch

137

8. Marx (1818–1883) Michael Quante

149

9. Dilthey (1833–1911) Rudolf A. Makkreel

171

10. Nietzsche (1844–1900) Brian Leiter

187

vi   Contents

11. Frege (1848–1925) Patricia A. Blanchette

207

PH I L O S OPH IC A L MOV E M E N T S 12. Idealism Terry Pinkard

231

13. Romanticism Fred Rush

258

14. Neo-Kantianism Frederick Beiser

282

15. Existentialism Katia Hay

299

A R E A S OF PH I L O S OPH Y 16. Philosophy of Nature Alison Stone

319

17. Philosophy of Science Frederick Gregory

336

18. Philosophy of Mind Barbara Gail Montero

354

19. Philosophy of Language Hans-Johann Glock

371

20. Nineteenth-Century German Logic Graham Priest

398

21. Hermeneutics Andrew Bowie

416

22. Philosophy of History Sally Sedgwick

436

23. Education Lina Steiner

453

Contents   vii

24. Ethics Paul Katsafanas

473

25. Aesthetics Paul Guyer

496

26. Political Philosophy Jean-François Kervégan

517

27. Feminism Jane Kneller

534

PH I L O S OPH IC A L T OPIC S 28. Skepticism and Epistemology Ulrich Schlösser

555

29. Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer

569

30. Methodology of the Sciences Lydia Patton

594

31. Materialism Kurt Bayertz

607

32. Perspectivism Songsuk Susan Hahn

622

33. Dialectics Claudia Wirsing

651

34. Evolution Christian Spahn

674

35. Bildung Kristin Gjesdal

695

36. Receptions of Eastern Thought Douglas L. Berger

720

37. The Other Michael Mack

736

viii   Contents

38. The Burden of Antiquity Jessica N. Berry

751

39. Historicism John H. Zammito

779

40. Ideology Michael N. Forster

806

41. Atheism Todd Gooch

829

Index

853

List of Contributors

Andreas Arndt is Professor (chair) of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology of the Humboldt-University, Berlin, and Director and Research-Coordinator of the Schleiermacher-Research-Center at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Born in 1949 in Wilhelmshaven (Lower Saxony), he studied Philosophy and German literature in Freiburg i.Br., Bochum, and Bielefeld; MA Bochum 1974, PhD Bielefeld 1979, habilitation at the Free University Berlin 1987, from 1987 to 2011 Associated Professor (Privatdozent) resp. Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Free University; Research Assistant at the Schleiermacher-Research-Center from 1979 to 2011. President of the International Hegel Society from 1992 to present. His latest book-publications include Die Klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant (with Walter Jaeschke, C. H. Beck, 2012) and Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Walter de Gruyter, 2013). Kurt Bayertz studied Philosophy, German Literature, and Social Siences. Since 1993 he is Professor for Philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany). His main fields of interest are: ethics, anthropology, and selected parts of the history of philosophy (among them materialism). His books include: GenEthics. Technological Intervention in Human Reproduction as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge University Press 1994. (ed.)), Solidarity (Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999), Warum überhaupt moralisch sein? (C. H. Beck 2004), and Der aufrechte Gang. Eine Geschichte des anthropologischen Denkens (C. H. Beck 2012). Frederick Beiser was born and raised in the US but received his education in the UK at Oriel College (BA) and Wolfson College (DPhil), Oxford. He immigrated to West Germany in 1980, where from 1980 to 1984 he spent most of his time writing in his Hinterhof. Subsequently, he wandered around the US, teaching at seven universities: Penn, Indiana, Yale, Wisconsin, Colorado, Harvard, and Syracuse. He has currently settled in Syracuse where he cultivates his garden. Recently, he has written two books on nineteenth-century philosophy: The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Late German Idealism (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has recently finished a manuscript entitled The Origins and Genesis of Neo-Kantianism. Douglas L. Berger is Associate Professor of Indian and Chinese Philosophical Traditions and Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics at the Philosophy Department of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the President of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the General Editor of the University of Hawai’i book series Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. Berger, the author of numerous essays and book chapters on Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist philosophers, has also done extensive research on Schopenhauer’s appropriation of early Indian ideas, represented in his 2004 book “The Veil

x   List of Contributors of Māyā:” Schopenhauer’s System and Early Indian Thought (Global Academic Publications/ SUNY).

Jessica N. Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she works on late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century German philosophy (especially issues in epistemology and value theory in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche) and in ancient Greek philosophy (especially the pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophers). Her book Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011), finished with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings together and expands upon work she has published in Philosophical Topics, The Journal of the History of Ideas, International Studies in Philosophy, and elsewhere. Patricia A. Blanchette is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Frege’s Conception of Logic (Oxford University Press 2012), as well as a number of articles on Frege, on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and on the history of analytic philosophy. Andrew Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include:  Aesthetics and Subjectivity:  From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester University Press, 1990, 20032); Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (Routledge, 1993); (ed. and trans.) F.W.J. von Schelling,‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ (Cambridge University Press, 1994); From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (Routledge 1997); (ed.) Manfred Frank, The Subject and the Text (Cambridge University Press, 1997); (ed. and trans.) F.D.E Schleiermacher. ‘Hermeneutics and Criticism’ and Other Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas (Polity Press, 2004); Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010), Philosophical Variations: Music as Philosophical Language (Aarhus U.P.); Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Polity Press, 2013), many articles. He is also a jazz saxophonist.

Michael N. Forster is currently Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Centre for Philosophy at Bonn University. He taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Chicago, where he served for ten years as chairman of the Philosophy Department and was Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor. His historical work is on ancient philosophy and especially German philosophy, his systematic work mainly on epistemology and philosophy of language. He has published numerous articles and seven books. Markus Gabriel is the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and Co-director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn. Author of ten books and over fifty scholarly articles, Professor Gabriel’s most wellknown works in the English-speaking world are Mythology, Madness and Laughter, written together with Slavoj Žižek, and Transcendental Ontology: Essays on German Idealism; and a translation of his Habilitation, Skepticism and Idealism in Ancient

List of Contributors    xi Philosophy is forthcoming. His main works on Schelling are Der Mensch im Mythos and Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitschrift. Sebastian Gardner is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He has published books and articles on the philosophy of psychoanalysis, Kant, German Idealism, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. She works in the areas of German Idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Her work has appeared in journals such as Kant-Studien, Hegel-Studien, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and British Journal of the History of Philosophy. Her book Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Reading. His research interests are in the fields of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and analytic philosophy more broadly. Glock has worked in particular with the topic of concepts and also on the question of animal cognition. Todd Gooch is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Eastern Kentucky University. His research interests are located at the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, and modern European intellectual history. He is the author of The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion and an entry on Ludwig Feuerbach in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has also published or has forthcoming articles and book chapters on philosophical issues in the works of Otto, Max Scheler, Hegel, the Young Hegelians, and J. S. Mill. Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida and past president of the History of Science Society. His research focuses on German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly as it relates to the philosophical and religious developments of the time. Among his major works are Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Springer, 1977)  and Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1993). He edited the English translation of Jakob Fries’s Knowledge, Belief, and Aesthetic Sense (Dinter Verlag, 1989) and his two-volume text, Natural Science in Western History, appeared in 2007 (Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Co.). Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University, and Florence R.  C. Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty volumes on the philosophy of Kant and on aesthetics. His A History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes appeared in 2014. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics and of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He is a Research Prize Winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Songsuk Susan Hahn works mainly in nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly on problems about moral agency in connection with freedom, and problems in aesthetics that elude purely rational, discursive thought. She received her PhD from Columbia University

xii   List of Contributors and is the author of Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value (Cornell University Press, 2007). Her current book project is entitled Nature Loves to Hide: Natural Norms in the Skeptical Tradition. The book investigates how skeptical doubts have motivated a naturalistic grounding of values in a range of authors, from Hume to Nietzsche, who are responding to practical problems about whether skeptics can live their skepticism. The book argues that their naturalism ought not to be regarded as an antidote to neutralize the threat of skepticism, but as originating out of their skeptical doubts. She recently co-edited with Allen Wood, The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy [1790–1870] (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University. Katia Hay studied philosophy and literature at the University Complutense in Madrid, and continued her studies in Paris, receiving her DEA (Diplome d´Etudes Approfondis) on Deleuze in 2004. She wrote her PhD dissertation on Schelling and the tragic at the universities of Munich (LMU) and Paris (Sorbonne, Paris IV) and received a double PhD summa cum laude in 2008. Her dissertation Die Notwendigkeit des Scheiterns. Das Tragische als Bestimmung der Philosophie bei Schelling has recently been published in the series Beiträge zur Schelling-Forschung (Alber, 2012). She has published numerous articles and book chapters and taught widely at the New School, Lisbon, Freiburg, and Chile. She’s a member of the Centro de Filosofia of the University of Lisbon and currently holds a post-doc position (FCT) at the University of Lisbon. Paul Katsafanas is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He works on ethics, agency, and nineteenth-century philosophy. His recent publications include Agency and the Foundations of Ethics:  Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford University Press, 2013), “Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming), and “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2011).

Jean-François Kervégan studied philosophy in Paris. Having been a researcher in the National Centre for Scientific Research (France) and in the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt, Germany), then Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), he is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University Paris 1 (Sorbonne) and senior Fellow of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’. His work concerns German philosophy and the philosophy of law. He translated Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Right into French. Last books (selection): Que faire de Carl Schmitt? (Gallimard, 2011); L’effectif et le rationnel. Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Vrin, 2008); (ed.) Hegel au présent. Une relève de la métaphysique? (CNRS, 2012). Jane Kneller is Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. Her research and scholarship focuses on Kant, especially Kant’s aesthetics and social theory, and also the philosophy of early German romanticism. Major publications include Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Novalis:  Fichte Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and numerous articles and book chapters on Kantian and early German romantic aesthetics and social theory. Michelle Kosch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. She is the author of Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press,

List of Contributors    xiii 2006) and articles on Kierkegaard, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Foucault. She is currently working on a book on Fichte’s ethics. Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Nietzsche (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 2001), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2007). His many articles on Nietzsche have appeared in Ethics, Philosopher’s Imprint, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, European Journal of Philosophy, and elsewhere. Michael Mack (PhD Cambridge) is Reader in English Literature at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging our Infatuation with Number (Bloomsbury, 2014), How Literature Changes the way we Think (Continuum, 2011), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010), German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001). Rudolf A. Makkreel is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University and the author of Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies and Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: the Hermeneutical Import of the ‘Critique of Judgment.’ Also co-editor of Dilthey’s Selected Works and of The Ethics of History; Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy; Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences. Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy from 1983 to 1998 and awarded fellowships by the NEH, DAAD, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Thyssen Stiftung, and Volkswagen Stiftung. He is currently writing a book entitled Orientation and Judgment in Critical Hermeneutics.

Barbara Gail Montero is Associate Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York. She has published papers on a wide range of topics related to the mind and is author of a forthcoming Oxford University Press book, The Myth of ‘Just do it’: Thought and Effort in Expert Action. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. You can find more about her and her research at http://barbaramontero.wordpress.com/. Dalia Nassar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute:  Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804 (Chicago University Press, 2013). Her article, “From a Philosophy of Self to a Philosophy of Nature:  Goethe and the Development of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2010), was awarded the prize for “Best Essay published in 2010” by the Goethe Society of North America. She has been a recipient of research awards from the DAAD (2003, 2004), the Thyssen-Stiftung (2009), and, most recently, the Australian Research Council (2012–15).

xiv   List of Contributors Lydia Patton is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Dr Patton’s research centers on the history and philosophy of science, and on related issues in epistemology. Recent work focuses on experiment and theory building, on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science and philosophy, and on Kant’s philosophy as a response to empiricism and rationalism. Her published works include “Experiment and Theory Building” (Synthese); “The Paradox of Infinite Given Magnitude” (Kant-Studien); “Hermann Von Helmholtz” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); and “Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori” (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science).

Terry Pinkard has taught at Georgetown University from 1975 to 2000, at Northwestern University between 2000 and 2005, and at Georgetown from 2005 to the present. He is the author of, among other books, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000); German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism; and Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is an Ehrenprofessor at Tübingen University in Germany, and he has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He gave the Guang-Hua lectures in 2011 at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (US). He is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia), and Arché Professorial Fellow at the University of St Andrews (UK). He works in many areas, including metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and Asian philosophy, but is best known for his work on philosophical logic—especially paraconsistent logic. He is the author of over 200 papers, and books including In Contradiction (2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2006), Beyond the Limits of Thought (2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002), Towards Non-Being (Oxford University Press, 2005), Doubt Truth to be a Liar (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2008). His new book, One, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Michael Quante (1962) is full Professor of Practical Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University. He is Speaker of the Zentrum für Bioethik and Co-Editor of the journal Hegel Studien. His books (in English) include: Hegel’s Concept of Action (Cambridge University Press 2004, paperback ed. 2007), Enabling Social Europe (Springer 2005; co-authored with Bernd v. Maydell et al.), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2008; co-edited with Dean Moyar), Moral Realism (Helsinki 2004 (= Acta Filosofica Fennica Vol. 76); co-edited with Jussi Kotkavirta), and Pragmatic Idealism (Rodopi 1998; co-edited with Axel Wüstehube). Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published extensively on Hegel and German idealism, and his interests include idealist approaches to logic and theology as well as the links between idealism and later pragmatist and analytic approaches to philosophy. His books include Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Logic of Affect (Cornell University Press, 1999), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009).

List of Contributors    xv Fred Rush teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Ulrich Schlösser has taught at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and at the Universities of Jena, Sheffield and Toronto. He is now Professor for Kant and German Idealism at the Universität Tübingen. Ulrich Schlösser has published on the relation between cognition and aesthetics in Kant’s philosophy, on Jacobi, Fichte, and on Hegel’s philosophy of mind in the Jena period. Sally Sedgwick is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her PhD in 1985 from the University of Chicago, and has held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the universities of Bonn, Bern, and Luzern. Her publications include the monographs Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:  An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford University Press, 2012). In 2009/10, she was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. Christian Spahn studied Philosophy, Communication Science, and German Literature at the University of Essen, Germany. He received his Masters from the University of Notre Dame, USA, and his PhD from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany, with the study Lebendiger Begriff—Begriffenes Leben: Zur Grundlegung der Philosophie des Organischen bei G.W.F. Hegel (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), analysing the logical foundation of Hegel’s philosophy of biology. His research areas include the philosophy of biology, epistemology, and German Idealism. Spahn was a post-doctorate fellow at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität of Jena, Germany, and taught in Fulda, Jena, and Bamberg, Germany. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Keimyung University, Daegu, South Korea. Lina Steiner directs a Research Center for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is the author of For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and a number of articles on literary history and theory, which have appeared in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Slavic Review, Russian Literature, and other journals. Her current book-length projects focus on the conceptual, intellectual, and disciplinary history of Philology in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States, and on Leo Tolstoy’s filiations with the German philosophical tradition.

Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer is Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Leipzig since 1992. His special interests are in the philosophy of logic and language, mind and action, and philosophy of German Idealism, esp. Kant and Hegel. Selected publications include: Hegels Analytische Philosophie. Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992); “Intuition, Understanding, and the Human Form of Life”, in Heikki Ikäheimo & Arto Laitinen eds., Recognition and Social Ontology (Brill, 2011, 85–113); “The Question of System: How to Read the Development from Kant to Hegel,” Inquiry 49, 1/2006, 80–102; and “Mathematical Thinking in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” International Yearbook of German Idealism, 3/2005, 243–60.

xvi   List of Contributors Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence:  Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007), and Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011). She also edited The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Other topics on which she has published articles include the Frankfurt School and the Early German Romantics, on whom she is currently completing a monograph. Claudia Wirsing is currently completing her PhD on Hegel’s concept of reality in the “Science of Logic” at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, and is research assistant at the University of Braunschweig—Institute of Technology. She is also co-editing the German Yearbook of Philosophy on Hegel’s Science of Logic (200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, Meiner Press) with Anton Friedrich Koch, Friedrike Schick, and Klaus Vieweg. She has published in the fields of social philosophy (with a focus on critical theory), epistemology and ontology as well as on German Idealism. John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. His research focuses on Immanuel Kant and his student and rival, Johann Gottfried Herder. He works more widely in history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. His key publications are: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His current research involves the genesis of biology in eighteenth-century Germany. Günter Zöller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. He studied at the University of Bonn, the Ecole normale supérieure, Paris and Brown universities, and held visiting professorships at Princeton University, Emory University, Seoul National University, McGill University, and Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as visiting fellowships at Queen’s College, Oxford, Harvard University, and University of Bologna. A past President of the International Fichte Society, past Vice President of the North American Kant Society, and editor of Fichte’s Collected Works of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, he is the author of Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy (1998) and Fichte lesen (2013).

I N TRODUCTION No period of history has been richer in philosophical discoveries than Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And while it was the eighteenth century that saw Germany attain maturity in the discipline (above all in the works of Immanuel Kant), it was arguably the nineteenth century that bore the greatest philosophical fruits. This volume aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of nineteenth-century Germany that will be helpful to readers of very different sorts, all the way from laypersons to undergraduates to experts. The chapters focus on several different areas: individual philosophers (e.g. Hegel, Marx), philosophical movements (e.g. Idealism, Romanticism), areas of philosophy (e.g. Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language), and philosophical topics (e.g. Skepticism and Epistemology, The Other). We have chosen the subjects of the chapters, and also to some extent guided their composition, with a view to maximizing comprehensiveness of coverage and reducing overlaps. However, since we believe the coverage of important subjects from a variety of perspectives to be a virtue, we have not sought to eliminate overlaps altogether, and we have made no attempt to dictate any particular approach let alone party line to contributors, who have been free to cover their subjects as they see fit. The German philosophy of the nineteenth century, and accordingly the chapters in this volume as well, can be roughly divided into several main parts or aspects, and it may be helpful to say a few words about each of these here at the start. A first is German Idealism. The founder of this movement was Kant, whose work really belongs to the eighteenth century and therefore lies beyond the official scope of this volume. But he is included here to a certain extent, and his main successors in the movement, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, all fall more squarely within the nineteenth century and therefore receive extensive coverage here. The thesis of “idealism” that ties this movement together is quite Protean. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” largely argued from a set of fairly technical considerations concerning the alleged existence of “synthetic a priori” knowledge (roughly, knowledge that is non-trivial but independent of experience) in such disciplines as mathematics to the mind-dependence of space, time, and their contents, while also, however, insisting that beyond this knowable but mind-dependent spatio-temporal realm there is an unknowable realm of mind-independent “things in themselves.” Fichte then argued that the notion of “things in themselves” was self-contradictory, that everything was dependent on the human mind, and that human beings therefore enjoyed a radical sort of freedom. Schelling began his career as a follower of Fichte, but then gradually came to believe that Fichte’s radical subjectivism was inadequate, that the self was in fact only one side of a single metaphysical principle (“the Absolute”) of which nature was the

2   Introduction other, equally important, side. This “philosophy of identity” (as it came to be known), which owed much to Spinoza, was subsequently adopted and modified by Schelling’s friend and colleague Hegel, who developed it in a way that tended to emphasize its subjective over its objective side. Finally, Schopenhauer developed a position that can also be classified as a form of “idealism,” drawing from the tradition just described but also adding the more distinctive conception that the feature of the subject that is most metaphysically fundamental is the will rather than cognition. German Idealism’s thesis of “idealism” is still taken quite seriously by philosophers today. But the importance of German Idealism also reaches far beyond it. One of the other things tying this movement together is an ideal of system in philosophy: roughly, an ideal of covering all forms of human cognition within a single theory that is not only self-consistent but also connects them all together in a way that reveals an illuminating pattern. As a result, the philosophers in this tradition have much to say about a wide range of important subjects, from science to morals to politics to aesthetics to history to religion and beyond. And much of what they have to say about these subjects is fascinating even independently of their idealism. This volume contains a number of chapters that discuss various aspects of German Idealism. Kant and his nineteenth-century followers are discussed in Frederick Beiser’s “Neo-Kantianism,” Fichte in Günter Zöller’s “Fichte,” Schelling in Markus Gabriel’s “Schelling,” Hegel in Paul Redding’s “Hegel,” and Schopenhauer in Sebastian Gardner’s “Schopenhauer.” In addition, several chapters discuss specific aspects of the German Idealists’ positions, including Ulrich Schlösser’s “Skepticism and Epistemology,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics,” Alison Stone’s “Philosophy of Nature,” Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind,” Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” Jean-François Kervégan’s “Political Philosophy,” Sally Sedgwick’s “Philosophy of History,” Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung,” and Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology.” Another part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is German Romanticism, a movement whose leading lights were Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher. This movement, which was more or less contemporary with German Idealism, is much less well known by philosophers in the Anglophone world, but is arguably just as important. Unlike the Idealists, the Romantics were anti-systematic and championed a fusion between philosophy and literature. Both of these stances may initially provoke suspicion among Anglophone philosophers. But that is a hasty response. For there are good arguments against systematizing in philosophy, and the sort of fusion of philosophy and literature that the Romantics envisaged was at least as much a matter of making literature theoretical as of making theory literary. Like the Idealists, the Romantics espoused a monistic metaphysics and had a strong interest in skepticism. Indeed, their conception of skepticism was often even more radical (e.g. Friedrich Schlegel went as far as to skeptically question logical law) and their considered response to it stayed closer to it than did the outright anti-skeptical responses offered by the Idealists: according to the Romantics, we can never achieve more than an “endless striving” towards knowledge. However, the greatest achievements of the Romantics arguably lay in a different area: as serious historians and linguists, they perceived, and were profoundly interested in, the phenomenon of deep historical and cultural difference or Otherness (Friedrich Schlegel already wrote early in his career of an “absolute difference” between ancient and modern culture, for example). They also had a sincere cosmopolitan respect for the historical/cultural Other.

Introduction   3 This whole position played a major role in the development of “historicism” in the nineteenth century. It also led to important theoretical and methodological developments by the Romantics themselves. For example, inheriting a “linguistic turn” that Herder and Hamann had already introduced in the eighteenth century, they developed a new discipline of “comparative grammar,” which constituted the beginning of modern linguistics, and they developed sophisticated new theories of understanding (“hermeneutics”) and of translation that were designed to cope with the problem of radical mental difference, for example, the problem posed to both interpretation and translation by the existence of radically differing conceptual resources. They also made important contributions to re-thinking the history of philosophy—dropping teleological schemas for interpreting it such as those that were espoused by Kant and Hegel in favor of greater open-mindedness and interpretive accuracy. And they made an even larger contribution to re-thinking the nature of ancient tragedy (as well as of genre more generally), in particular sharply rejecting Aristotle’s account of it in the Poetics and developing a new interpretation of it as deeply religious-Dionysiac and political in character (this led to Nietzsche’s similar interpretation of it later in the century in The Birth of Tragedy and has largely been confirmed by more soberly detailed modern scholarship). The Romantics were also, at least in the early and best period of their thought, radicals in domestic politics who championed democracy, liberalism, individuality, the rights of Jews, and respect for women. This progressive political stance went hand in hand with a refreshing boldness in their theorizing and a radically experimental approach to living (they were pioneers of what J.S. Mill would later call “experiments in living”). For example, Schleiermacher advocated the possibility of an endless variety of forms of religion, including forms without God (!), and Schlegel asked why there should not be a “mariage à quatre.” This volume contains several chapters that discuss Romanticism, including Andreas Arndt’s “Schleiermacher,” Dalia Nassar’s “Friedrich Schlegel,” and Fred Rush’s “Romanticism” (which also takes into account the quasi-Romantic philosopher-poet Hölderlin). Other relevant chapters include Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung,” Andrew Bowie’s “Hermeneutics,” John H. Zammito’s “Historicism,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics,” and Jane Kneller’s “Feminism.” Two further parts of nineteenth-century German philosophy are each occupied by a single but towering thinker: Marx and Nietzsche. Although in many ways sharply opposed in their philosophical positions, Marx and Nietzsche also share certain things in common. These include a deep rootedness in the German philosophical tradition (in Marx’s case especially Hegel, in Nietzsche’s especially Schopenhauer); a respect for empirical evidence; a radical critique and rejection of the culture they found around them; as part of that, an unqualified dismissal of religion in general and Christianity in particular (in sharp contrast to the attempts to save both that had characterized most of their predecessors in German philosophy); an attempt to go beyond the sorts of critiques of traditional proofs of God and the sorts of disproofs of God’s existence that agnostic and atheistic predecessors had furnished in order to provide in addition a serious explanation of why, despite their extravagant falsehood, (Christian) religious beliefs acquire their grip on people’s minds, a project which led both of them to identify mechanisms that are not only deluding but also pernicious (in Marx’s case an ideological reinforcement of invidious class oppression, in Nietzsche’s a slandering of life motivated by Ressentiment); a critical rejection even of morality; and not least a fierce independent-mindedness and intellectual commitment,

4   Introduction reflected in their uncompromising, solitary lifestyles (neither of them was a “professional philosopher” working within the confines of a university). Marx’s central ideas include the complex phenomenon of the “alienation” of human beings under capitalism that he describes in his early work, his material or economic theory of history, his labor theory of value, and his theory of ideology. He is by no means exclusively or even mainly the preserve of philosophers, and almost everything in his position has been contested both interpretively and in respect of its value. However, he has had the good fortune to have been blessed in recent decades with several philosophical interpreters who have been exegetically rigorous, sympathetic, and subtle in defending his positions (including G.A. Cohen and A.W. Wood). So his prominence in this volume should certainly occasion no surprise. This volume contains several chapters concerned with Marx’s position, including: Michael Quante’s “Marx” (which adopts the—of course, controversial—approach of interpreting Marx’s central ideas in light of his morally informed views about “alienation” in the early writings), Kurt Bayertz’s “Materialism,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics,” Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology,” and Jean-François Kervégan’s “Political Philosophy.” Nietzsche, like the Romantics, is opposed to systematizing in philosophy (he writes in one place that “the will to a system is a lack of integrity”). Indeed, it is not even clear that he aspires to systematicity in the minimal sense of self-consistency. He is a merciless and penetrating critic of Christianity who diagnoses its otherworldism in psychological terms as a sort of slandering of this world (the only world there is, in his view) by people who have failed within it and who have therefore fallen prey to Ressentiment. He is perhaps even more important for his critique of Christian moral values and their secular descendants. Here his thought began from a deep, sympathetic knowledge of pre-Christian Greek culture, which he acquired through his early career as a classical philologist. This gave him access to a moral standpoint that was quite contrary to that of Christianity and its secular descendants, a standpoint that had endured for many centuries and with which they could be compared and found wanting (see, for example, his early work On Homer’s Contest). His own positive project concerning moral values, the project of their “revaluation,” is largely an attempt to revive Homeric values, albeit while also revising them. Nietzsche also develops a powerful methodological tool for understanding and criticizing modern moral values, a tool that goes beyond such straightforward comparisons: the method of “genealogy.” This method basically starts out from a historicist insight into the deep changes in values that have occurred over the course of history and attempts both to understand modern Europe’s moral outlook and to show its shortcomings by tracing it back to the earlier components that have over time contributed to and congealed into it. Another methodological tool that he brings to bear in his critique of modern morality and in other contexts is a sophisticated psychology, which in particular recognizes the role of the unconscious, active forgetting, and repression (in anticipation of Freud). Other aspects of his philosophy are fascinating as well (albeit both exegetically and intrinsically problematic), including his “perspectivism,” his principle of the “will to power,” and his doctrine of “eternal recurrence.” This volume contains two chapters that focus mainly on Nietzsche: Brian Leiter’s “Nietzsche” and Songsuk Susan Hahn’s “Perspectivism.” Other chapters that discuss aspects

Introduction   5 of Nietzsche’s thought include Katia Hay’s “Existentialism,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” and Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics.” Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is the philosophy of language, along with such closely related areas as linguistics, hermeneutics, and translation theory. Herder and Hamann had prepared the ground for nineteenth-century philosophy of language by sharply rejecting a traditional Enlightenment dualism concerning the relation between thought and language, concept and word, in favor of seeing thought as essentially dependent on and bounded by (or even identical with) language, and concepts as consisting in word-usages. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Romantics and Wilhelm von Humboldt took over this position and revised it in order to include a more holistic picture of language. They then used this as a foundation on which to build a new science of linguistics (Friedrich Schlegel and Humboldt), a new theory of interpretation (or “hermeneutics”), and a new theory of translation (in both of these cases mainly Schleiermacher). Nor did philosophy of language in nineteenth-century Germany remain confined to that group and its many direct descendants; it also came to play a large role in such diverse philosophers as Otto Gruppe, Nietzsche, Frege, and Fritz Mauthner. The present volume contains two contributions that discuss aspects of this side of nineteenth-century German philosophy: Hans-Johann Glock’s “Philosophy of Language” and Andrew Bowie’s “Hermeneutics.” Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is philosophy of history (in a broad sense). Nineteenth-century Germany was a golden age for the writing of history as such: including the history of law (e.g. Niebuhr and Savigny), the history of philosophy (e.g. Schleiermacher, Hegel, Zeller, Haym, and Dilthey), and general history (e.g. Ranke and Droysen). Philosophizing about history was correspondingly prominent as well. At least two very different forms of it can be distinguished. First, there were attempts to develop philosophies of history in a narrow sense: grand narratives about history that aimed to make sense of its overall course, typically in teleological terms. The most important figures here were Hegel and Marx. But second, and to some extent in deliberate rejection of such ambitious projects, there were also more modest methodological reflections on the discipline of history, including reflections concerning how, given the profound mutability of human thought, conceptualization, values, and so on over the course of history, it was even possible for historians to understand another age; reflections concerning what the theoretical purpose of writing history should be; and reflections concerning whether, and if so how, history could be scientific (as the natural sciences are). Two of the main contributors on these topics were Droysen and Dilthey, who between them developed a powerful unified answer to all three of the questions just mentioned, an answer that placed understanding and its methodology, hermeneutics, at the center of the discipline of history. The present volume contains chapters concerned with both of these sorts of “philosophy of history.” For the first, see especially Sally Sedgwick’s “Philosophy of History” (which mainly focuses on Hegel), as well as the relevant parts of Michael Quante’s “Marx.” For the second, see John H.  Zammito’s “Historicism,” Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences,” and Rudolf A. Makkreel’s “Dilthey.” Closely connected with the philosophy of history, another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is a recognition of, and deep interest in, historical and cultural Otherness. This position involved a sharp rejection of Enlightenment

6   Introduction universalism, in continuity with the rejection of it by eighteenth-century thinkers such as Herder. It often went hand-in-hand with a deep interest in individual Otherness as well. The Romantics, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey are all good examples of this recognition of, and interest in, historical and cultural Otherness. Their recognition of it had a deep empirical grounding (they all had an impressive knowledge of relevant languages and were skilled as historians and interpreters). Their strong interest in it had a variety of motives. One was simply a fascination with the phenomenon itself. Another was a fascination with its apparent philosophical implications, such as skepticism or relativism. (Dilthey was largely driven by these two motives, for example.) Another was a fascination with the contribution that recognizing it could make towards our better self-understanding, both by enabling us to see our own outlook in a comparative light and by enabling us to understand how it had been generated out of other outlooks that preceded it historically (this was a prominent theme in both Hegel and Nietzsche, for example). Yet another was an interest in the contribution that it could make to self-critique. For instance, the enthusiasm for the Otherness of the ancient Greeks that already began in Germany in the eighteenth century (e.g. Winckelmann, Schiller, and early Friedrich Schlegel) and then continued in the nineteenth (e.g. Hegel and Nietzsche) often involved using them as a sort of ideal that could serve as a weapon for criticizing features of modern German/European culture that the enthusiast disapproved of, such as Christian religion, Christian moral values, political despotism, or mediocre art. (This motive in certain cases led to a somewhat fancifully idealized picture of the ancient Greeks, it should be noted.) The present volume contains several contributions that discuss this topic of historical and cultural Otherness. Concerning its historical aspect, see especially John H. Zammito’s “Historicism” and Jessica N. Berry’s “The Burden of Antiquity.” Concerning its cultural aspect, see especially Michael Mack’s “The Other” and Douglas L. Berger’s “Receptions of Eastern Thought.” Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is the philosophy of education (in a broad sense). Four historical aspects of this subject are worth noting here. First, since Herder and Schiller in the late eighteenth century at the latest, German thought about education had focused not only on the activities of educational institutions such as schools and universities, but also on the morally educative function of literature (and art more generally). Second, already beginning with Kant’s War of the Faculties in the late eighteenth century, and then continuing in the nineteenth century with Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt, philosophers of the period developed an agenda of in effect deposing theology from its traditional position as the top faculty in the universities and substituting philosophy in that role (the amount of hostility to religion involved in this agenda varied, for example, from none in the case of Schleiermacher to quite a lot in the case of Humboldt). Third, during this period the ideal that education was supposed to realize increasingly became conceptualized as Bildung—a concept that has no exact English equivalent, but which in the classic version of it that Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated connoted, roughly, a person’s free self-realization as a distinctive individual in a manner that essentially depends on language and includes a balanced development of the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and physical faculties into a harmonious whole. Fourth, in 1809/10 Humboldt served as head of the Prussian ministry responsible for education and effected a sweeping reform of all levels of the educational system that made this ideal of Bildung central (in instituting this reform he also drew on the ideas of several other important

Introduction   7 contemporaries, including Pestalozzi at the level of primary education, F.A. Wolf at the level of the high school or Gymnasium, and Schleiermacher at the level of the university). The results of this reform are to a great extent still with us—not only in Germany but also in other countries (e.g. they arguably constitute the foundations of American university education). And in Germany the debate about the ideal of Bildung continues to this day. Two chapters in the present volume focus on the philosophy of education: Lina Steiner’s “Education” and Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung.” Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is concerned with the relation between philosophy and science, or Wissenschaft (a German term that is famously less narrowly restricted to natural science and disciplines modeled on it than its English counterpart). The prestige of the sciences developed from strength to strength in nineteenth-century Germany. The Humboldt brothers can serve as exemplars of two important sides of that trend:  during the early decades of the century Wilhelm von Humboldt participated in the development of linguistics (along with the Schlegel brothers, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, and others), history (along with the Romantics, Niebuhr, Savigny, Hegel, and others), and to some extent also philology (along with the Romantics, August Boeckh, and others); while Alexander von Humboldt returned to Berlin from extensive natural scientific travels around the world in 1827, delivered his famous and popular Kosmos lectures on the natural sciences there, and thereby both marked and contributed to a new rise in the prestige of the natural sciences. It would be an exaggeration to say that German philosophy’s concern with science had to wait for these developments (for example, Kant had already been profoundly concerned with mathematics, physics, and other natural sciences, Herder and Goethe had already shared a strong interest in the natural sciences as well, and Schelling had already invented the Philosophy of Nature during the last decade of the eighteenth century). However, it is fair to say that the breadth and the depth of philosophy’s concern with science increased in the nineteenth century. Some striking examples of this are the Philosophy of Nature of both Schelling and then Hegel; the rise of a new form of materialism grounded in sciences such as physics, biology, and neurophysiology (which led to a famous Materialismusstreit in mid-century); the ascent of theories of evolution in general and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species of 1859 in particular, which had a major impact on certain German philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche); intense debates concerning the difference between, and the proper methods of, natural sciences such as physics, on the one hand, and human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften, such as history, on the other (Droysen, Dilthey, Windelband, and Helmholtz all played large roles here); and developments in mathematics and formal logic that had deep philosophical implications (Frege was the towering figure here; his “logicism,” or attempt to reduce arithmetic to logic, was among other things a direct challenge to Kant’s conception of arithmetic as synthetic a priori, and although in Frege’s own and most of his critics’ estimation it ultimately failed, it produced revolutionary technical advances in logic as well as generating a deeper understanding of the element of truth in Kant’s position). But the new prestige of the sciences also affected philosophy even beyond those central cases. For example, Nietzsche, who went through a significant positivist phase, was influenced by materialism and theories of evolution and as a trained philologist also looked to philology as a paradigm of scientific rigor. And the mature Marx conceived his own theories as scientific.

8   Introduction The present volume contains a considerable number of chapters that focus on these topics. Concerning the Philosophy of Nature, see Alison Stone’s “Philosophy of Nature.” For discussion of materialism and the Materialismusstreit, see Kurt Bayertz’s “Materialism” and Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind.” Christian Spahn’s “Evolution” addresses theories of evolution. Concerning the methods of the natural and the human sciences, see Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences” and Rudolf A. Makkreel’s “Dilthey.” On mathematics and formal logic, see Graham Priest’s “Nineteenth-Century German Logic” and Patricia A. Blanchette’s “Frege.” For discussion of Marx and Nietzsche, see the chapters on them already cited. Finally, nineteenth-century German philosophy also made important contributions to virtually all areas of philosophy that are still distinguished in academic philosophy departments today, contributions which are in many cases not only of historical interest as strong influences on the ways in which these areas are now handled but also of great intrinsic value. Metaphysics and the opposition to it played a large role in the philosophy of the period: in the present volume Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics” is devoted to this topic. Epistemology in general and skepticism in particular played a large role in this period as well: this is covered in the present volume in Ulrich Schlösser’s “Skepticism and Epistemology.” Philosophy of language was also already an important part of the philosophy of the period (as previously mentioned). In this volume it is covered mainly by Hans-Johann Glock’s “Philosophy of Language.” Philosophy of Mind was a pervasive and multi-facetted concern of the period as well: in this volume this subject is mainly covered by Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind,” which focuses on several central aspects of it, including an influential model of consciousness that was developed by Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, the mind–body problem, materialism, and the unconscious. Formal logic and philosophical issues connected with it played an important role in this period as well. These topics are addressed in the present volume by Graham Priest’s “Nineteenth-Century German Logic” and Patricia A. Blanchette’s “Frege.” Philosophy of science also already played a significant role in this period and is covered in this volume by Frederick Gregory’s “Philosophy of Science” and Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences.” Moral philosophy was another major preoccupation of the period, both in the form of the bold attacks on traditional morality and ethics that were launched by Marx and Nietzsche and in a more constructive mode. In the present volume this topic is covered by Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” while the other chapters on Nietzsche and Marx also discuss their contributions to it. Political philosophy was also an important topic of the time, encompassing a wide variety of competing approaches: it is considered in this volume in Jean-François Kervégan’s “Political Philosophy.” Aesthetics played an important role in the philosophy of the period as well and is discussed in the present volume by Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics.” Finally, philosophy of religion was another lively topic of the time, both among defenders of religion such as Kierkegaard (a Dane who is included here as a sort of honorary German because of his intimate connections to German philosophy) and among opponents of religion such as Marx and Nietzsche. In the present volume the chapters concerned with philosophy of religion include Michelle Kosch’s “Kierkegaard,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology,” and Katia Hay’s “Existentialism.”

PH I L O S OPH E R S

Chapter 1

Fichte (1762–181 4) Günter Zöller 1.1  The First System of Freedom The philosophical work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) is political through and through. His thinking, no matter how abstract, arid, and seemingly removed from current affairs, reflected the dramatic developments of his age: from the French Revolution through the European Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte to the German national uprising in the Liberation Wars against the Corsican conqueror. The key concept of Fichte’s eminently political philosophy was freedom: political freedom from oppression and domination, but also cognitive freedom from error and illusion, cultural freedom from foreign influences and manipulation, moral freedom from the dictates of selfish interests, social freedom from economic inequality and injustice, religious freedom from superstition and blind faith, and philosophical freedom from prejudice and presumption. But the multiform freedom pursued by Fichte was not merely negative and geared to the removal of obstacles and hindrances. Freedom for Fichte meant primarily the positive freedom of self-determination, politically speaking of self-governance and the deliberate subjection to rules of one’s own making or consenting. Accordingly, freedom for Fichte essentially involved norms for the proper use of freedom—laws that guide its employment in the pursuit of ends set and means chosen. Moreover, for Fichte freedom understood as autonomy also served as the final end of human existence, something to be pursued for its own sake and not trumped by any other aim or object. Fichte inherited the focus on freedom as the motor and goal of all worthy human life and as the chief concern of sustained philosophical reflection from Kant, who had devoted his mature philosophy to delimiting the conceptual space for freedom in a world otherwise governed by natural causal laws and their thoroughgoing determination of things and events. In particular, Kant had placed the human being in a twofold relation to reality: one of subordination to the laws of nature and one of exemption from such laws and submission to the alternative legislation of freedom, chiefly manifest in the moral law governing self-determined agency. The price Kant had paid for this dual image of human existence was a two-layered account of reality. The order of nature, manifestly real and governed by strict physical laws, was downgraded to the level of appearances, which, while not only semblance or mere

12   Günter Zöller illusion, had no subsistence of their own and pointed beyond themselves to their grounding in an inscrutable substratum of reality (“things in themselves”). On Kant’s idealist account, the ordinary world of objects and persons in space and time reflected both the underlying but unknowable presence of the things (in) themselves and the shaping influence of universal human forms of knowing (space, time, and the categories, chief among them causality) that accounted for the lawful regularity of the spatio-temporal world. Having been released from the binding laws of physical reality, the realm of things in themselves received its non-cognitive, practical interpretation in Kant’s moral philosophy, where it served as the sphere for the grounds and bounds of human rational agency. Kant envisioned the conceptual space of freedom as a sphere of normative directions and constraints combining the negative freedom from natural determination with the formal freedom of choice and the positive freedom of rational self-determination. Fichte followed Kant closely in the idealist interpretation of the natural world as involving mere, though real, representations and in the correlation of free agency with an underlying stratum of reality outside of space, time, and the natural causal order—a realm of radical freedom governed by non-natural, “moral” laws that involved norms rather than facts and commands (“ought”) rather than descriptions (“is”). But he also sought to outdo Kant in extending the scope of the cognitive forms for the shaping of reality and in minimizing the role of the inscrutable things in themselves, which he reduced to formal limiting points providing resistance to human self-induced, spontaneous activity by holding the latter “in check.” Most importantly, Fichte aimed at expanding the foundational function of freedom, which Kant had limited to the moral world order, to include the physical world, now viewed as nothing but the natural sphere for the exercise of supra-natural freedom. Fichte’s declared aim was to institute freedom as a truly universal and unitary principle that would provide the ultimate grounding for both worlds and provide for their integration by way of reciprocal interaction, with the natural world materially informing the moral order, and the moral order normatively enhancing the natural world. In the process, Fichte sought to turn philosophy, which in Kant had been divided into the theoretical philosophy of nature and the practical philosophy of freedom, into an all-encompassing “system of freedom,” and the first such system at that. In a closely related move, Fichte set out to establish reason, which in Kant had been divided into the theoretical reason involved in the determination of objects and the practical reason involved in the determination of the will, as the unitary source and ultimate resource for normative claims of all kinds. Freedom, which for Kant had been the “cap stone” in the architecture of reason, was to become the common ground and unitary foundation for each and all of the integrated parts of the philosophical system. For Fichte the unity of theoretical and practical reason, which already had been envisioned by Kant but instead located by him in an original dimension beyond human reach or grasp and in a final perspective aiming at an unreachable goal, was to find concrete realization in the convergence of theory and practice, of nature and freedom, of self and world. The basic modes of human spontaneous accomplishment, knowing and doing, previously correlated and compared but not actually integrated, were to be traced to a basic form or condition of self-determined and self-governed, “free” human activity. Fichte used or coined various terms to describe the elusive ground of human reason in order to lend expression to its unitary but complexly structured and dynamically

Fichte (1762–1814)   13 constituted character and its unique modality of freedom. Those terms—chiefly among them “positing” (setzen), “factual act” or “(f)act” (Tathandlung), and “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung)—were designed to convey the “original duplicity” of cognition and volition in a grounding dimension or a foundational layer preparing subsequent differentiation as much as transcending it. The overall practical orientation of Fichte’s intended first-ever system of freedom brought with it the constitutive character of willing in Fichte. For Fichte the primary reality was volitional—directly so in the immediate practical consciousness of the motives, objectives and norms of one’s willing, and indirectly so in the mediated theoretical consciousness of the objects and products of willed action. At points Fichte even considered willing to be the only reality and all other seemingly real entities, including the subjects doing the willing and the objects willed, to be nothing but projections and vehicles for the conveyance of willing. The outlook on the world that resulted from Fichte’s system of freedom and the primacy it granted to willing was that of a natural world fit and designed to be shaped by human work and of a socio-cultural (“moral”) world suited and subject to change and innovation under the guiding principle of universal freedom. For Fichte the material world in general and human bodily existence in particular were but the sphere and instrument, respectively, for the material manifestation of a spontaneous mental activity attributable to the reign of “spirit” over matter and of minds over things. Its spiritual origin combined with its somatic and social orientation made the system of freedom envisioned by Fichte unsuitable for conventional presentation and instruction. Rather than resulting in a body of philosophical doctrines to be transmitted by the spoken or written word, Fichte intended his public philosophical thinking to inspire his readers and listeners to their own free thinking about the grounds and bounds of freedom and to draw the consequences therefrom for their own lives. Taking up the principle of enlightenment, as formulated by Kant, namely, to think for oneself, Fichte challenged the intellectual public to make freedom and the rational self-determination it entailed the guiding principle of each and everyone’s thinking and doing.

1.2  The Transcendental Science The system of freedom projected by Fichte early on did not come to fruition all at once and completely. Fichte spent his entire professional life from 1793 through 1814 developing, revising, and publicizing the system-to-be, producing over a dozen versions of it, all but the very first of which never were published during his lifetime. The elusive character of the system of freedom was chiefly due to its ambitious aim of lending formal rigor and scientific method to the presentation of a subject matter that essentially eluded treatment in fixed concepts and concise doctrines, namely the status and function of the unconditioned and infinite—freedom—in finite, conditioned life. In its basic outlook Fichte’s attempted scientific system of freedom followed Kant’s project of a transcendental philosophy intent and able to provide the necessary conditions for the very possibility of the experience of objects in space and time. By distinguishing between the unlimited, non-empirical (“a priori”) origin of transcendental principles and

14   Günter Zöller their limited, empirical (“a posteriori”) use, Kant had sought to establish a “metaphysics of experience” (H. J. Paton) that combined the empiricist concern with the sensory bounds of reason with the rationalist focus on a kind of knowledge that was to be valid independent of experience. Fichte set out to continue Kant’s transcendental project of a non-empirical meta-knowledge about the conditions and limits of possible knowledge and of the possible objects of knowledge. He renamed transcendental philosophy “Wissenschaftslehre,” alternatively translated as “doctrine of science” and “science of knowledge,” in order to indicate the scientific status of philosophy as the foundational discipline for cognitive claims of all kinds. Unlike Kant, who had limited transcendental philosophy to theoretical philosophy concerned with the cognition of what is, Fichte was intent on including practical philosophy, specifically moral philosophy, in the scope of the meta-science that philosophy was to be, even according it the prime position in the set-up of the system. Fichte also followed Kant—and some early post-Kantians—closely in basing the transcendental-scientific system of freedom on a set of principles inspired by the Kantian first principle of apperception that involved the spontaneous generation of the basic structure of thinking, expressed in the universal proto-thought, “I think.” In order to render the Kantian principle of apperception truly universal, Fichte expanded its scope to include the grounding of all kinds of cognition, volition, and feeling. In the process, he replaced the specific terms, “thinking” and “intuiting,” with the generic term, “positing,” designed to convey the spontaneous pre-conscious mental activity underlying all conscious mental acts and any (self-)consciousness of them. Fichte also followed Kant in designating the alleged agency manifesting itself in conscious as well as pre-conscious mental acts with the nominalized pronoun of the first person, “the I.” For Fichte the I served not only as the origin and basic form of self-awareness of self-consciousness but also as the basis of all consciousness of objects and, by extension, of all objects of such consciousness. In particular, Fichte sought to trace the very fact of objects being given in experience to the original introduction—by the actively producing, “positing” I—of a produced, “posited” not-I subject to further differentiation and determination into an entire world of objects. Fichte’s covering term for the I in its dual function for the constitution of self-consciousness (subjectivity) and the constitution of the consciousness of objects (objectivity) was “subject-object” or “subject-objectivity.” When the first (and only) published version of the Wissenschaftslehre—presented as “Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre” (1794/95)—met with a hostile and polemic reception targeting the alleged solipsism and subjective idealism of the reformed transcendental philosophy, Fichte attempted a new presentation (Wissenschaftslehre “nova methodo”), in which he integrated the previously separate foundational, theoretical, and practical parts of his first philosophy into a continuing philosophical narrative (“history of self-consciousness”) about the emergence of self- and world-awareness on the part of a practically intelligent being whose will is formally free in its choice but materially bound by the theoretical and practical norms of correct cognition and right conduct. Chief among the norms of intelligent willing were the principles of law and ethics, to both of which Fichte devoted substantial book publications that lent a good measure of specificity and concreteness to the more general and abstract foundations of transcendental philosophy he had provided previously. Other planned material extensions of the system of

Fichte (1762–1814)   15 philosophy into the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of religion remained unrealized or merely sketched.

1.3  The State of Right Fichte’s philosophy of law appeared, under the title Foundations of Natural Right, in 1796/97, in advance of Kant’s corresponding work, the “Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right” from the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Fichte’s early philosophy of law differed considerably from Kant’s slightly later work, which was to treat law together with ethics as integral parts of moral philosophy subject to the moral law and based on the categorical imperative of right that unconditionally constrained everyone to limit the outward use of their own freedom to its compatibility with the corresponding freedom of everyone else. By contrast, Fichte—drawing on the early modern tradition of the social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)—treated law as an object of prudential considerations based on the enlightened self-interest that individuals have in an association that affords them the security from each other and the solidarity with each other deemed essential for the productive pursuit of their own ends. The move from a specifically moral to a decidedly political conception of right in general and of legal obligation and lawful constraint in particular marked a radical break, on Fichte’s part, with the tradition of natural law that had tied the juridical sphere to moral norms allegedly based in the nature of things, including human nature. Still, Fichte shared the intent of natural law to subject positive, historically actual law to supra-positive and trans-historical conditions in order to assure the freedom of law from arbitrary choice based on the partial interests of power and domination. But unlike the cosmological or theological grounding of traditional natural law in a world order or a divine will, law in Fichte—to the extent that it was natural as opposed to historical, universal as opposed to particular, and necessary as opposed to contingent—was founded upon the requirements of self-conscious intelligent agency. Fichte extended his transcendental argumentation to the legal and political sphere, claiming that the establishment of a juridico-political order in general and of a liberal such order in particular was a necessary condition for the emergence and flourishing of fully formed human individuals. More specifically, Fichte argued that human beings could achieve consciousness of themselves not in isolation from each other but only in community with each other and in a “free community” at that. While centering the political order of law around the self-determined, free individual human being and introducing right as a legal principle along with its plural realizations (rights) for the ulterior purpose of individual freedom, Fichte considered individuality and its legal entitlements not natural occurrences but the result of a legal and political formative process that turned pre-social intelligent animals into free citizens. For Fichte the transition from the single, asocial, and pre-political human individual to a juridico-political community of socialized and freely associating individuals involved an act of “recognition,” more precisely the recognition of one intelligent agent by another such being and as such a being. In a fictitious original scene of association Fichte had an already emerged, practically rational human being seek to initiate the emergence of freely chosen

16   Günter Zöller rational conduct in a human being of only dormant practical rationality. The “solicitation” or “summons” to a life of rational willing was to be based on facial and other bodily features that indicated the rational potential in a still pre-rational individual. As a call to conscious practical freedom, the educational influence exercised by one individual on another was not to operate through sheer physical force. Rather the summons to a life of practical reason was to take the form of symbolically mediated communication, such as speech. Moreover, the recognition involved was not to remain a singular and one-sided event but was to result in reciprocal and continuing recognitional conduct and to extend beyond the two parties involved in the original social scene to include an entire community constituted and maintained by free mutual influence. According to Fichte, the instrument for enabling and assuring consistent communal recognitional conduct was the principle of right, according to which everyone was to have the use of their individual freedom informed—in effect, limited—by the notion of everyone else’s individual freedom. The sphere of right so established allowed and assured the socially compatible exercise of freedom in a common space delimited by the multilateral recognition of everyone’s equal status as a free rational agent. The right so derived, as a condition of the original emergence and continued existence of self-conscious intelligent agency, was not, as in Kant, a moral necessity but a matter of pragmatic rationality. On Fichte’s account, it would constitute an illogical inconsistency in the conduct of one’s life to first benefit from the social initiation into intelligent agency and subsequently negate and even undermine the very conditions of such rational socialization by refusing to continually and reciprocally recognize other intelligent agents as such in one’s own continuing conduct toward them. In order to lend stability and reliability to the rationally indicated practice of continued recognitional conduct, Fichte had the original institution of right include the establishment of a power sufficiently strong to assure and effectively enforce conformity with rightful conduct. That social power was the state understood as a state of right in which the exercise of power and the use of force were subject to restricting conditions reflecting the state’s narrow purpose as a guarantor of the legal order and not as a guardian of morality or a provider of social welfare. The basic outlines of political governance provided by Fichte’s philosophy of right stood in the early-modern tradition of the social contract and included an entire series of such contracts by means of which the state was first instituted and the citizens originally subjected themselves to its power. Most notable among the further features that made up the Fichtean state as the political protector of right were: an account of property that sought to balance private ownership and social utility, a conception of punishment for legal transgression that considered transgressors, who had disregarded the law’s constraining forces, as also having placed themselves outside the law’s protective force, and the institution of a supervisory body (“ephorate”) overseeing the just order and operation of the state and entitled as well as called upon to intervene in circumstances of bad governance. A certain tendency to legal overregulation of citizens’ compliance with the law notwithstanding, Fichte’s early philosophy of law belongs to the modern tradition of the liberal state according to which the state is set up to enable and safeguard the citizens’ personal freedom in the exercise of their rights, which involve the acquisition and exchange of material and immaterial property. Accordingly, the equality involved in mutual recognitional

Fichte (1762–1814)   17 conduct is primarily a legal equality, to the exclusion of the political freedom expressed in participatory legislation or popular rule. Nor did Fichte’s legal egalitarianism include a specifically legal concern with social equality. Fichte was to address the latter issue outside the confines of legal philosophy proper in the sphere of “applied politics.” In particular, in his later work in political economy (The Closed Commercial State; 1800)  he advocated from a juridico-political standpoint the socio-political goal of individual and national economic self-sufficiency, arguing for its legal basis in the universal right to be able to live from one’s work and its political grounding in the state’s extensive governance of the market of goods and labor.

1.4  A Concrete Ethics By assigning the philosophical foundation of law and politics to contractual rules of prudence governing the institution and preservation of socially enabled individual flourishing, Fichte had reduced practical philosophy in the Kantian sense of a moral philosophy based on an unconditional law of conduct (moral law) to the narrow field of ethics. Still, Fichte’s System of Ethics, published in 1798 closely after the appearance of Kant’s late material ethics, the “Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue” in Part Two of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), differed considerably from his predecessor’s ethics of unconditional command (categorical imperative). For Fichte ethics was not a matter of imposed instruction or even of self-imposed lawfulness in one’s ethical intentions (maxims) but of enhancing naturally and socially embedded individual life by means of rational choice in light of the ultimate end of complete freedom. Accordingly, ethics was not to focus on curbing affects and passions but on seeking out and marshaling those natural forces inside and outside the human being which, in a given situation, could best contribute to the evercloser approximation to the elusive final goal of supreme self-determination. The methodological ideal of a naturally and socially embedded, concrete ethics notwithstanding, Fichte’s System of Ethics was for the most part not concerned with specifying ethical obligations (duties) according to social circumstance but with the derivation (“deduction”) of the chief rule of ethical conduct and of the formal and material conditions that assure its possible effective application under suitable circumstances. Given the preponderance of basic reflections on the conditions of the very possibility of ethical action, Fichte’s System of Ethics presented itself, to a large extent, as a proto-ethics addressing the pre-ethical requirements for an ethical life, which chiefly included a constitution of the self and of the world amenable to the ethical project of transforming determined nature into self-determining freedom. In its core Fichte’s (proto-)ethics offered a transcendental theory of free willing. Fichte had the self (“I”) originally come to self-awareness as a being that wills, i.e. that self-determines its actions through the concept of an end to be chosen, intended, and enacted. Fichte’s specific claim was that a finite intelligent being originally encountered itself only as willing; no other relation to itself would afford such a being an incipient awareness of itself as a self—as a being essentially involved in a self-relation that let it both grasp and generate its own, free being. At the most basic level, the originally free, will-endowed being was said to will itself, more precisely its own freedom in the practice of

18   Günter Zöller self-determination. For Fichte, being free of any alienating determination from within and without and constituting oneself in genuine, pure self-determination required that one’s willing be guided by concepts, and by a conception of free agency at that. Considered in its overall design, Fichte’s ethics was marked by the seemingly contrary characteristics of aiming at concreteness in terms of the content of ethical action and at absoluteness in the modality of the overall pursuit of freedom for freedom’s sake. Fichte sought to reconcile these contrary tendencies by distinguishing between the matter of ethical freedom, which was provided by changing circumstances and specific situations, and its identical form, which consisted in free self-determination for its own sake. Moreover, he placed the material and the formal factor of ethical action in a developmental relation according to which a given ethical action was to be identified and chosen in view of its hypothetical standing in an infinite sequence of interrelated acts (“series”) ideally terminating in the final purpose of absolute freedom. The claimed correlation of a given ethical act to an ideal ethical series reflected Fichte’s concern with the integration of nature and morality. Natural ends as well as means were to be regarded as instrumental in view of a supra-natural project—the project of complete, absolute freedom—that could only be realized, or rather infinitely approximated, in the natural world and under the latter’s conditions, which were therefore to be regarded as enabling as much as limiting conditions for the free final end of ethics. But it was not only the natural world that was subordinated to ethical ends. On Fichte’s account, the human individual, too, ultimately was only an instrument for the supra-individual end of reason realized across individuals and beyond personal limits. Rather than being the subject and author of ethical perfection, the individual human being was but the vehicle and medium for the implementation of the moral law. For Fichte the point of ethics was to ensure that, in the long run, all would act in the same, perfectly rational way. In order to assure the proper match of a particular end or action willed with the infinite series terminating in sheer self-determination and perfect freedom Fichte resorted to “conscience” as an ethical arbiter. He considered the latter’s unreflected consent to a considered course of action an infallible indicator of the action’s ethical qualification for advancing the long-term goal of all ethical pursuits, i.e. the exclusive rule of reason in the world within and without. For Fichte ethical qualification did not involve the possible universalization of subjective principles of action (maxims), as Kant maintained, but the action’s possible integration into the road to reason revealed by the inner voice of conscience. In addition to seeking to correlate natural and ethical ends of willing Fichte’s concrete ethics also aimed at coordinating the independent course of ethical action of plural, and even infinitely many, individual human agents. Drawing on older metaphysical speculations, chiefly to be found in Leibniz, about a divinely prearranged match and fit between independent, self-sufficiently operating individual beings (monads), Fichte maintained a pre-established harmony of sorts between individual agents that assured, in principle, the effective cooperation of ethical agents in pursuit of the common goal of reason’s rule. Fichte sought to avoid the deterministic implications of such a preordained ethical world order by distinguishing between the ethical necessity of a given action and the factual contingency as to who would carry out the preordained action at what point in time and what place in space.

Fichte (1762–1814)   19 The dual concern with the natural embeddedness and the supra-natural freedom of ethical action also animated Fichte’s account of the “drives” that were said to orient and motivate all human activity including specifically ethical pursuits. Kant had entrusted pure practical, “moral” reason with the exceptional ability of sufficiently determining the will to action entirely independently of other motivating grounds such as sensory impulses (“incentives”), in the process construing morality as anti-nature and burdening reason with complete responsibility for moral motivation. For Fichte any ethical efficacy on the part of practical reason had to be grounded in the agent’s nature broadly conceived. The latter chiefly included the agent being driven in one way or another to this or that end. On Fichte’s account there could be no action without a corresponding directing and driving force in the agent. Rather than juxtaposing drive-ridden and reason-driven action, Fichte sought to integrate naturally based and ethically based action into a comprehensive account of human agency. In particular, Fichte both distinguished and conjoined the “natural drive,” originating in human sensory nature, and the “pure drive,” issuing from human rational nature. The two drives were said to merge to form the “ethical drive” as a “mixed drive,” reputedly taking its content from the natural drive and its form from the pure drive. Alternatively to this compositional, synthetic account, Fichte considered the duality of formal and material drives as one-sided and complementary manifestations of an originally unitary drive (“proto-drive”) that eluded direct presentation. While Fichte’s integrationist construal of the mixed drive managed to combine natural and rational determining factors in the constitution of the ethical drive, it did not address the essential element of freedom in human action in general and in ethical action in particular. With respect to human freedom Fichte argued that any drive-based action still required the approval through freely given consent without which no drive could become effective in a being acting not on impulse alone but in view of a conception of ends. The freedom so exercised was the “formal freedom” involved in each action to be called free, as opposed to the “material freedom” that constituted the specific end of ethical action, namely complete self-determination as an end in itself. Its strict separation from law and politics notwithstanding, Fichte’s concrete ethics included a critical perspective on human social existence in the modern state. For Fichte the state as a legal instrument for the institution and preservation of right relying on force and constraint was an essentially temporary measure eventually to be supplanted by a genuinely ethical community. The alternative socio-political organization envisioned in Fichte’s System of Ethics was an ethical, inner state or a “church,” where the latter term was not being understood to designate a particular religious community with a special creed and a specific set of beliefs but the potentially universal quasi-political body of ethically minded human beings that had overcome the limitations of selfish individuality in favor of regarding and treating their individuality as a vehicle for the ethical state. Fichte’s supra-political conception of a universal ethical community added to the rather liberal features of his philosophy of law, which had stressed the rule of law and the equality of rights, a more communitarian ethos of social life marked by the subordination of the individual under the whole of which it was at once a constitutive member and a resultant function. For Fichte the ethical purpose of social existence was not the material and moral flourishing of the individual as such but the latter’s integration into a “world of spirits” that

20   Günter Zöller transcended spatial and temporal location and limitation and was expressive of the unconditional, “absolute” nature of reason.

1.5  Philosophical Teacher and Public Intellectual Fichte’s innovative and rapid development of philosophy as a comprehensive system of knowledge based on human spontaneity and freedom had taken place in the institutional context of his academic teaching and publishing. But within four years Fichte’s prominent position as a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena came to a sudden end when he lost this influential post over charges of atheism leveled against his published views on religion, according to which what was traditionally called “God” amounted to nothing but the sum-total of the world viewed in a perfectionist moral perspective (“moral world order”). Further accusations included the identification of idealism with “nihilism” or the denial of any reality other than the one brought forth (“posited”) by the human being. Fichte spent the next decade mainly in Berlin, giving private instruction and offering public lecture courses to an adult audience, before eventually assuming a professorship at the newly founded University of Berlin (1810– 14), where he served as rector, dean, and professor until his early death from an infectious disease contracted from his wife, who had worked as a nurse in a Berlin military hospital. The willful misrepresentations and grotesque misunderstandings of his published views made Fichte ever more skeptical of lending a fixed form to his ongoing philosophical work. On the average, Fichte offered a new, substantially revised, if not radically altered, presentation of his core philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) once a year during the 14 remaining years of his life, none of them brought to publication by him and all of them only made available in the posthumous publication of his complete works. His contemporaries only knew of Fichte’s further work through a number of published lecture series in the philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of education, and philosophy of culture that built on his core philosophy but substituted systematic rigor for popular appeal, exhortation for argument, and rejection for refutation. The pronounced parallelism of scholarliness and popularity in Fichte’s mature and late thinking was philosophically motivated. For Fichte philosophy was not to be a self-sufficient academic exercise in pursuit of some rare and superior knowledge, but the acquisition and application of a range of insights informed by natural and social reality and bent on acting back on that reality by way of transformation and with the end of emendation. In line with Fichte’s thorough conviction of the essential freedom of human existence, any such improving influence of philosophy on the wider population had to take the form of intelligent instruction rather than indolent indoctrination. Fichte’s covering term for the extra-philosophical origin of philosophical insight as well as for its extra-philosophical telos was “life,” the latter term not taken in a narrow biological sense but as a designation for the self-contained inherently dynamic realm of reality which philosophy might mirror in sustained reflection (“speculation”) without ever

Fichte (1762–1814)   21 achieving the latter’s vitality and independence. The point of philosophy for Fichte was to give a comprehensive account of life that could in turn serve to redirect the latter’s course. The overall trajectory of Fichte’s mature and late philosophy was marked by his growing concern with the distance that separated philosophical speculation from a real life that was to exhibit the very freedom considered in the abstract by his own system of freedom. Rather than offering his philosophical insights as lessons to be learned, Fichte came to understand and present them as insights that the philosopher-apprentice had to become. Philosophy was not to be a matter of simply having some knowledge but of actually being that knowledge—of instantiating the knowledge about the grounds and conditions of reality in one’s own thinking and doing, in the process turning knowledge obtained into wisdom lived. The chief step toward the serial presentations of Wissenschaftslehre from Fichte’s later years was undertaken with the second lecture course from the year 1804. The later Fichte abandoned the earlier focus on the (positing, oppositing, and compositing) I in favor of a two-staged account of knowledge as grounded unconditionally or absolutely in some inscrutable prior dimension (“the absolute,” “being,” “God”) and grounding in turn the world as the sum-total of possible or actual objects of knowledge. According to Fichte, the basic move from being to knowing was marked by conditional necessity. While it was to be regarded as a matter of cosmic contingency, not to be derived from any law or decree, that the absolute manifested itself or “appeared,” the appearance itself, once it had to be taken to have occurred, followed strict rules, chiefly including the absolute’s original manifestation as knowledge, rather than as (objective) being, and the derivative status of thing-like as a lawful product of non-empirical, “transcendental” subjectivity (“knowledge”). The overtly metaphysical, even theological, language (“God,” “revelation”) to be encountered in the later Fichte was probably adopted in an attempt to comply with the changing conceptual practices of his philosophical contemporaries (F. H. Jacobi, F. W. J. Schelling) and resulted from Fichte’s intent to reach an audience no longer inclined to Kant’s sober critique of reason. The changed character of the later works has led many interpreters, past and present, to sever the later Fichte from his earlier, specifically critical phase, even saddling him with the diagnosis of mysticism, offered alternatively as an attribution of praise or of blame. Still, to the unprejudiced reader who takes into account Fichte’s entire literary production, Fichte appears as far more consistent in his views and continuous in his developments. The “absolute I” of the early Fichte, which designated more the aspect of absoluteness or the unconditional character underlying the finite I than an independent entity of its own, anticipated the later figuration of the unconditional ground of knowledge as “the absolute.” Just as the close connection of the absolute with knowledge in the later Fichte took up his earlier exclusive emphasis of the unconditional, self-regulated, “free” character of knowledge independent of natural factors and preternatural dictates. The later Fichte went to great lengths in maintaining the close correlation between the absolute, which was said to manifest itself only in knowledge, as knowledge and for knowledge, and knowledge as such, which was essentially absolute in its basic character as objectively conceived cognition independent of psychological, physiological, and physical conditions, which might contribute to its occasional articulation but did not constitute its validity. In particular, Fichte presented the core insight of philosophy as the intuitive grasp of the mutual requirement of thinking and being, of the real and the ideal, of subject and

22   Günter Zöller object, reflecting an original point of unity that was as much the origin of differentiation as of unification, of disjunction as of conjunction, and that properly constituted what was absolute and not subject to anything else. A further feature uniting the early and the later Fichte was the articulation of knowledge as the central topic of first philosophy into a fivefold structure of the chief domains of knowledge and their associated world views. Building on earlier discussions of the fivefold cyclical set-up of knowledge (“synthetic periodic structure”), the later Fichte distinguished and interrelated the ascending series of world views, reaching from nature through (juridical) law, ethics, and religion to their integration and sublimation through philosophy. Compared to the detailed doctrines contained in his earlier works, the elaborate reflections of the later Fichte on the absolute and its appearance, i.e. knowledge, can seem monotonous and repetitious. While limiting the doctrinal core of his later philosophy to ever fewer basic propositions, ultimately reducing them to the “one thought” that the absolute “is” and has knowledge as its “appearance,” Fichte insisted ever more on the existential import of philosophical insight, eventually sending off his listeners with the admonition: “Now that you have knowledge, become wisdom!” The basic continuity between the early and the later Fichte notwithstanding, one central feature was conspicuously absent from Fichte’s later thinking in general and from the later presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre in particular. The former “system of freedom,” with its constitutive linkage of knowledge and freedom, seemed to have turned into a system of absolute knowledge—a system of knowledge as the absolute-in-appearance, which was at once a system of knowledge about the absolute and a system about knowledge instantiating the absolute. Freedom now resided primarily in the inscrutable contingency of the absolute’s apparition, which involved, according to Fichte, an “irrational hiatus” that defied rational rules.

1.6  A Political Philosophy of History and Religion The former focus on freedom that seemed to elude Fichte’s later work in first philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) found a new outlet in Fichte’s later popular philosophy, chiefly in his philosophical reflections on the course of political history past, present, and future and an allied developmental account of religion. In these works—chief among them Basic Traits of the Present Age (1805–6), Addresses to the German Nation (1808), and The Doctrine of the State (1813)—Fichte stepped forth as a cultural critic, political preacher, and religious philosopher bent on illuminating the past, castigating the present, and preparing the future of humanity. Drawing on Kant’s conjectural history of human development in the juridico-ethical sphere as a natural history of freedom and anticipating Hegel’s developmental history of the ever-increasing consciousness of freedom, Fichte read human history as the gradual emergence of regulated social life from instinctual guidance through selfishly employed reason to socially responsible practical rationality. The overall development of human history traced by Fichte ran from the initial clandestine rule of reason under the guise of

Fichte (1762–1814)   23 instinctual control through the contrarian and chaotic liberation of reason from natural guidance to an eventual return to lawful order and secured stability on the basis of enlightened freedom and insight. After first having located the nadir of human history in his own present—citing the latter’s materialist world view, naturalist philosophical outlook, and cult of common sense— Fichte came to see the beginnings of a world-historical reversal from selfish reason to social reason in the fateful situation of the German lands, in particular his adopted home country, Prussia, in a situation marked by the complete military defeat through Napoleon and the ensuing total collapse of the old political life. Tracing an ancient German—or rather, Germanic—lineage of political freedom and quintessentially republican rule, Fichte appealed to his fellow countrymen to undertake a twofold cultural-political revolution, outwardly from imperial rule and inwardly from princely power, effectively calling for a unified “republic of the Germans.” While couched in a markedly nationalist language, involving aggressive appeals to the cultural and intellectual superiority of the “German nation” over the civilized nations in the orbit of the ancient Roman Empire, chiefly among them France, Fichte’s philosophy of political liberation was cosmopolitan in scope and intent. Fichte outright defined patriotism as the political practice of advancing the universal human goal of equal freedom in one’s own nation first, only to move on from there beyond national bounds and borders. On Fichte’s instrumentalist understanding, nationalism was cosmopolitanism-in-progress. In Fichte’s vision post-Napoleonic France and politically liberated Germany were to form the core of an enlightened Europe of the future. The concrete outlines of the new European order that lay beyond the previously prevalent political oppression from within and without emerged in Fichte’s late political philosophy, which was developed as a political history of religion from the ancient world to the new, modern world. In particular, Fichte stressed the political advances brought about by the universal claims of the Christian religion that had overturned the exclusive tie of human dignity to civic status, to be found in the pagan ancient world, in favor of the dignity of each and every human being independent of socio-political status. While evidencing a philosophical appreciation of its socio-political advancements, Fichte’s selective appropriation of Christianity disregarded even discarded specific teachings, notably those concerning sin and salvation, maintaining instead the mutual corruption of human beings in social relations marked by the arbitrary exercise of power but also their ability to establish a political order based on the reign of right. For Fichte, as for Kant before him and Hegel after him, human history was—or rather, was to be—the history of establishing a rightful political order at the national and international level. An integral part of the political progress from force to right and from unfree domination to free self-determination envisioned by Fichte was the eventual substitution of external constraint through free, voluntary compliance in the maintenance of just laws and political order. In particular, Fichte contrasted the earlier observance of law through “blind faith,” characteristic of traditional societies, and their casting of political obligations as religiously sanctioned rules, with the free compliance borne from “insight” into the nature of right and its basis in the equal freedom of everyone. Still, Fichte’s writings, especially those from his later years, largely because of their overt theological language, lent themselves to religious appropriation, just as his insistence on the strict moral or political laws correlated with universal freedom lent itself to a reading

24   Günter Zöller that stressed authority rather than autonomy and submission rather than liberation in the governance of human conduct. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the spectrum of positions that lay claim to Fichte’s profoundly political philosophy ranged from liberals, even libertarians, through socialists and communists to nationalists and religious reactionaries. In contemporary academic philosophy, though, Fichte has chiefly been read, regarded, and respected as a critical thinker in the tradition of Kant who made major contributions to the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy and who initiated the move from Kant’s plural foundations of philosophy to a unitary but complexly organized system of philosophy under the guiding principle of freedom.

Bibliography Complete Editions of Fichte’s Works Fichte’s Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, 11 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971). J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth et al., 42 vols. in four series (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962–2012).

English Translations of Fichte’s Main Works Addresses to the German Nation, ed. G. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Fichte, J.  G. and Schelling, F.  W. J. The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), trans. and ed. M. G. Vater and D. W. Wood (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012). Foundations of Natural Law, ed. Frederick Neuhouser and trans. M. Baur, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) Nova Methodo (1796/99), ed. and trans. D. Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, ed. and transl. D. Breazeale (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994). The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. and ed. W. Wright (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions, trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). The System of Ethics, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale and G. Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The Vocation of Man, ed. R. Chisholm (New York: Macmillan, 1986).

English-language Monographs on Fichte Beck, Gunnar, Fichte and Kant on Freedom, Rights, and Law (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008). Breazeale, Daniel, Thinking Through the “Wissenschaftslehre”: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Fichte (1762–1814)   25 Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Fichte, Historical Context/Contemporary Controversies (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., New Essays on Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001). Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Bodies, Rights, and Recognition: New Essays on Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2010). Breazeale, Daniel, Rockmore, Tom, and Waibel, Violetta, eds., Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010). Henrich, Dieter, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” Contemporary German Philosophy, 1 (1982): 15–52. James, David, Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). La Vopa, Anthony J., Fichte. The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762—1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Martin, Wayne M., Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Nakhimovsky, Isaac, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Neuhouser, Frederick, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990). Rockmore, Tom, Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). Seidel, George J., Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794:  A  Commentary on Part I (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993). Williams, Robert R., Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). Wood, David W., “Mathesis of the Mind.” A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012). Zöller, Günter, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Chapter 2

Schleier m acher (1768–1834) Andreas Arndt 2.1  Life and Works Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau as the son of a Reformed Prussian army chaplain. 1 He was educated by the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter), whom he left in 1787 to study theology and philosophy in Halle with the support of his uncle, Samuel Ernst Timotheus Stubenrauch (1738– 1807). In 1790 he completed the first theological examinations and then took on a position as private tutor in the house of Count Dohna in Schlobitten (East Prussia). In 1794 he became an assistant pastor in Landsberg an der Warthe, before he was appointed the Reformed pastor at the Charité hospital in Berlin, where he served until 1802. In Berlin he entered into the world of intellectual society and literary salons, where he also met Friedrich Schlegel, with whom for a while he shared a f lat. 2 Schleiermacher worked on the Schlegel brothers’ journal Athenaeum, and at the urging of his friend Friedrich Schlegel he presented his first writings to the public. Encouraged through Friedrich Schlegel’s project of a co-translation, he also began an intensive study of Plato. Schleiermacher’s participation in the early Romantic movement, his association with the Jewish salons and not least his relationship with the wife of a colleague, Eleonore Grunow (1770–1839), whom he had urged to divorce her husband, 1  The standard setter is still the classic yet fragmentary (covering only up to Schleiermacher’s time in Halle) biography by Wilhelm Dilthey: Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Reimer, 1871); 2nd, expanded edition, ed. H. Mulert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922); corresponding to the current state of research in 2000: Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001); see also Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1967); Martin Redeker, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Leben und Werk (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968); Hermann Fischer, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Munich: Beck, 2001). 2  Cf. Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher und die Frühromantik (Weimar: Böhlau, 1986); Andreas Arndt, ed., Wissenschaft und Geselligkeit. Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin 1796–1802 (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2009).

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   27 led to his demotion to a position as court pastor in the town of Stolp in Pomerania. It was here that he completed his Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803) and began with the publication of his translations of Plato. At the beginning of 1804 Schleiermacher was offered a professorship at the University of Würzburg. He remained, however, in Prussia and was appointed for the winter semester 1804/05 professor of theology and philosophy and university pastor in Halle. In his lectures in Halle he laid the foundations for his theological and philosophical system. After the university was closed in the wake of the Prussian defeat against Napoleon, Schleiermacher went to Berlin, where at first he held private lectures before becoming pastor of the Berlin Dreifaltigkeitskirche in 1809 and in 1810 professor of theology at the newly founded University of Berlin, the organizational structure of which Schleiermacher had decisively influenced through his policy paper Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn (‘Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense’) (1808). In 1810 Schleiermacher was also inducted into the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which gave him the right to hold philosophical lectures at the university as well. Politically, Schleiermacher was close to the Prussian reform party, for whom he also worked conspiratorially during the Napoleonic occupation, and was active chiefly in the reform of the educational system. After the victory over Napoleon he was suspected of demagoguery; his lectures and sermons were put under surveillance and he found himself confronted with the threat of dismissal from office; the harassments only ceased in 1824. In church politics, Schleiermacher was a proponent of the independence of church and state and worked toward the union of the Prussian Lutheran and Reformed churches, which was achieved in 1817. Schleiermacher died on 12 February 1834 and was buried in the cemetery of his Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Berlin. Schleiermacher did not leave a major work from which one could reconstruct his philosophy as a whole. Ethics was his main object of interest, but he did not finish a comprehensive treatment of ethics, nor of any other discipline. His philosophy is essentially a work in progress and comes to light primarily in his lectures,3 which were published posthumously in the Sämmtliche Werke. In philosophy, there has been and remains only a marginal recognition of Schleiermacher’s thought, while his work in theology and pedagogy is firmly established as belonging to the classics.

3  Cf. Gunter Scholtz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984); Wolfgang H. Pleger, Schleiermachers Philosophie (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1988); Christian Berner, La philosophie de Schleiermacher (Paris: Cerf, 1995); Andreas Arndt, ‘Kommentar’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher: Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996), 993–1279; D. Burdorf et al., eds., Dialogische Wissenschaft. Perspektiven der Philosophie Schleiermachers (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998); Ignacio Izuzquiza, Armonía y Razón. La filozofía de Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1998); Sarah Schmidt, Die Konstruktion des Endlichen. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Wechselwirkung (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2005); Andreas Arndt, Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2013). See also the reviews of recent writings on Schleiermacher by Michael Moxter, ‘Neuzeitliche Umformungen der Theologie. Philosophische Aspekte in der neueren Schleiermacherliteratur’, Philosophische Rundschau 41 (1994), 133–58; and Ulrich Barth, ‘Schleiermacher-Literatur im letzten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Theologische Rundschau 66 (2001), 408–61.

28   Andreas Arndt

2.2  Enlightenment, Kant, and Spinoza: Schleiermacher’s Own Path to Early Romanticism There is no consensus on Schleiermacher’s place in post-Kantian classical German philosophy.4 Influenced by eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought,5 he undertook early on a critical examination of Kant’s philosophy. His philosophy teacher in Halle, Eberhard, aroused his interest in the history of philosophy, above all in ancient philosophy. Under Eberhard’s guidance he studied in particular Aristotelian ethics.6 Toward the end of his studies in 1789, Schleiermacher wrote an essay, Über das höchste Gut (On the Highest Good),7 which critiqued Kant’s ethico-theology and argued against the mixing of theology and philosophy. Another unpublished fragment, Über die Freiheit (‘On Freedom’) (ca. 1790–92)8 centres on the thought of individuality. Because individuals contribute to bringing forth the ethical whole that determines them, determinism and freedom can be harmonized with each other: freedom is negatively determined as ‘the absence of a coercion’ (KGA I/1, 334) and signifies the possibility of a way of relating to the given from which new determinations can in turn result. This approach is further developed in the essay Über den Wert des Lebens (‘On What Gives Value to Life’) (1792/93), intended for publication but not published, in which the French revolution and Rousseau are strongly echoed.9 4  Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Schleiermacher. Dialectic and Transcendental Philosophy, Relationship to Hegel’, in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, ed. B. W. Sockness et al. (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2010), 349–60. 5  Cf. Eilert Herms, Herkunft, Entstehung und erste Gestalt des Systems der Wissenschaften bei Schleiermacher (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1974), chap. 1.—The connection between the Herrnhuter movement and the Enlightenment in Schleiermacher is described by Ulrich Barth, ‘Schleiermachers Gang durch die Herrnhuter Frömmigkeit und die Hallesche Spätaufklärung’, in Schleiermacher-Tag 2005. Eine Vortragsreihe, ed. G. Meckenstock (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006), 45–50. 6  Schleiermacher’s position between Scholasticism in Halle and the Kantian critique of reason is a point of contention; in his Leben Schleiermachers, Dilthey stresses Kant’s influence, as do Günter Meckenstock, Deterministische Ethik und kritische Theologie. Die Auseinandersetzung des frühen Schleiermacher mit Kant und Spinoza 1789–1794 (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1988); and Hagar Spano, Filosofia pratica e individualità. Sulle meditazioni etiche del giovane Schleiermacher (Naples: Edizioni Dante & Descartes, 2002). Eilert Herms, Herkunft (note 5) and Fritz Weber, Schleiermachers Wissenschaftsbegriff. Eine Studie aufgrund seiner frühesten Abhandlungen (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1973) place stronger emphasis on the influence of Scholasticism in Halle, as does Bernd Oberdorfer, Geselligkeit und Realisierung von Sittlichkeit. Die Theorieentwicklung Friedrich Schleiermachers bis 1799 (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1995). Peter Grove also situates Schleiermacher’s early thought in the context of the points of contention between Eberhard, Reinhold, and Kant. See Peter Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2004). 7  KGA I/1, 83–125. On the Highest Good, trans. H. Victor Froese, Schleiermacher Studies and Translations, 10 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 8  KGA I/1, 219–356. On Freedom, trans. Albert L. Blackwell (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 9  KGA I/1, 393–471. On What Gives Value to Life, trans. Edwina Lawler and Terrence N. Tice. Schleiermacher Studies and Translations, 14 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995).

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   29 In his manuscripts written in 1793/94, Spinozismus and Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems10 Schleiermacher tried—independently of parallel attempts at the same time in Jena and elsewhere—to bring together Kant’s critical philosophy and Spinoza. Schleiermacher built upon Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelsohn in the second edition from 1789. In Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems he wrote, Kantianism seems to be, ‘if it understands itself, on Spinoza’s side’ (KGA I/1, 570). For Schleiermacher, Spinoza’s philosophy elucidates the necessary presupposition of Kant’s critical idealism, namely, a being that transcends consciousness and, with that, of an objective philosophy. Conversely, Kant’s philosophy makes clear that in Spinozism we can thematize this being only in the framework of a limited, subjective faculty of knowledge and not in and of itself. In Spinoza’s philosophy Schleiermacher emphasizes the relationship of the infinite and finite; the finite things are ‘illusion’, but this illusion is the appearance or manifestation of the infinite. While the finite things do not have any existence independent of the infinite and must be thought of as existing in the infinite (just as the infinite does not have another existence except vis-à-vis the finite), they are not simply identical. With a view to Kant, this implies that the appearing actuality is regarded as the appearance of an infinite, but without knowledge of this infinite ‘in itself’. With this combination of Kant and Spinoza, the special interest in individuality in the framework of an historical mediation of nature and freedom, and enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Schleiermacher’s thought found a correspondence with the interests of the early Romantic philosophy being developed at the same time by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg. Thus Schleiermacher’s encounter with Friedrich Schlegel in Berlin was a meeting of equals and their ‘symphilosophizing’ was a mutual exchange, and not a one-way conversation.

2.3  Symphilosophy and the Transformation of Early Romanticism For Schleiermacher, the encounter with Friedrich Schlegel brought a confirmation of his positions up to that point and at the same time a broadening of his horizons, with Fichte and Plato coming to play a more prominent role in Schleiermacher’s interests.11 In his first (anonymous) publication, the unfinished fragment Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens (1799),12 Schleiermacher presented a theory of the salon, which represents a third sphere of sociability (Geselligkeit) between private and civic life, not bound to any purpose, and initiated by women. Here every person should be able to become aware of ‘his 10 

KGA I/1, 513–82. Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Fichte und die Frühromantik (F. Schlegel, Schleiermacher)’, in Wissen, Freiheit, Geschichte. Die Philosophie Fichtes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert I, J. Stolzenberg et al., eds. (Amsterdam et al.: Rodopi, 2010), 45–62; Andreas Arndt, ‘Schleiermacher und Platon’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher: Über die Philosophie Platons, ed. P. Steiner (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), VII–XXII. 12  KGA I/2, 165–184. Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Schleiermachers Theorie der Geselligkeit’ in Kennen Sie Preußen—wirklich?, D. Holtz et al., eds. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2009), 163–8. 11 

30   Andreas Arndt or her own humanity through one’s own free activity’ and also of ‘the humanity of others through their effects’ (KGA I/2, 30). Schleiermacher’s best known independent contribution to early Romanticism is his anonymously published text from 1799, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers). This text was part of the turn to the topic of ‘religion’ since the summer of 1798 in the early Romantic circle of friends.13 Schleiermacher emphasizes the ‘sharp opposition’, in which ‘religion is found over against morals and metaphysics’.14 The essence of religion is ‘neither thinking nor acting, but rather intuition and feeling. Religion wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own presentations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity.’15 Not the universe in itself, but rather its effect upon us is the object of intuition. The action of the universe upon us produces religion, in that we ‘accept every singularity as a part of the whole, all limited things as a representation of the infinite’, while we cannot comprehend ‘the nature and substance of the whole’.16 Schleiermacher presupposes here an original intuition, in which receptivity and spontaneity are not yet differentiated.17 The original intuition consists in a pre-reflexive experience of unity, which cannot be held on to as such, but rather separates into the isolated intuition on the one hand, which becomes the object of reflection, and feeling, which as the ‘sensibility and taste for the infinite’18 signifies the interiorization of that pre-reflexive unity. The intuition of the universe is always connected to an individual apprehended as an action of the universe. Schleiermacher explicitly states: ‘Intuition is and always remains something individual, isolated’, and religion does not go further than the realm of the ‘immediate experiences of the existence and action of the universe, the individual intuitions and feelings’.19 While philosophy attempts to connect the individual (empirical) intuitions and to arrange them in a systematic whole (and in doing so transforms them into concepts), religion considers directly the individual as self-manifestation of the universe. Schleiermacher refers to the ‘adored and celebrated starry sky’ as a symbol of religions.20 The starry sky appears without a centre, without a ‘semblance of system’ and this ‘infinite chaos, where of course every point represents a world, is as such the most suitable and highest symbol of religion’.21 Religion regards the individual directly as part and presentation of

13  Cf. Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher und die Frühromantik (note 2), 119ff.; Hermann Timm, Die heilige Revolution. Schleiermacher—Novalis—Friedrich Schlegel (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1978). 14  KGA V/2, 211. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. and ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 22. 15  KGA V/2, 211; On Religion, 22 (translation modified). On the central significance of intuition, cf. Hans-Peter Großhans, ‘Alles (nur) Gefühl? Zur Religionstheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur. Akten des Kongresses der Internationalen Schleiermacher-Gesellschaft in Berlin, März 2006, ed. A. Arndt et al. (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2008), 547–65. 16  KGA I/2, 214; On Religion, 25. 17  Peter Grove has pointed out that this corresponds to Reinhold’s concept of intuition as the unmediated relation of a representation (Vorstellung) to the object; but the representation is here not yet conscious or mentally conceived, that is related to a specific object; cf. Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts (note 6), 304. 18  KGA I/2, 212; On Religion, 23. 19  KGA I/2, 215; On Religion, 26. 20  KGA I/2, 215; On Religion, 26. 21  KGA I/2, 216; On Religion, 27.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   31 the whole. That an individual is intuited as the whole has two meanings: the universe—the One—is intuited as in all; and at the same time all is intuited in the One, the universe.22 The concept of free sociability comes up again in the Speeches on Religion; the fourth speech treats the church as a social union, as living ‘interaction’ of those who have religion. Religion is a communal coming to an understanding of ‘intuitions and feeling’.23 If it is the essence of religion to subjectively intuit the universe and interiorize it in feeling, then religion is always already the individual self-presentation of the infinite, which can occur only in infinite modifications. Religion is hence pluralistic in its essence and not exclusionary. Religious intuition of religion demands that one relinquish ‘the vain and futile wish that there exists only one’, that one recognize the diversity of religions and encounter them ‘as impartially as possible’.24 Schleiermacher, however, explicitly discusses only the Jewish and Christian religions, whereas Judaism is ‘already long since a dead religion’.25 The individualization of religion corresponds to the individualization of humanity in the human individual. The conception of humanity as the community of free spirits, in which the antinomy of freedom and necessity is overcome and individuals mutually recognize each other as free, is central in the anonymously published Monologen (1800).26 The ‘highest intuition’ that philosophy can teach is that of humanity:  thus I realized what is now my highest intuition, it became clear to me that each human represents humanity in his or her own way, in a particular mixture of its elements, so that in each way there is self-manifestation and actualization of everything that can be born of humanity in the fullness of the infinite.27

With the Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre, entworfen von F. Schleiermacher (Berlin: 1803),28 written during his ‘exile’ in Stolp, Schleiermacher 22  KGA I/2, 245; On Religion, 52: ‘Now let us climb still higher to the point where all conflict is again united, where the universe manifests itself as totality, as unity in multiplicity, as system and thus for the first time deserves its name. Should not the one who intuits it as one and all thus have more religion, even without the idea of God, than the most cultured polytheist? Should Spinoza not stand just as far above a pious Roman, as Lucretius does above one who serves idols?’ 23  KGA I/2, 267; On Religion, 73. 24  KGA I/2, 296; On Religion, 98. 25  KGA I/2, 314; On Religion, 113. Cf. Matthias Blum, ‘Ich wäre ein Judenfeind?’ Zum Antijudaismus in Friedrich Schleiermachers Theologie und Pädagogik (Cologne et al.: Böhlau, 2010), 20–30. On the plurality of religions cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Identität der Religionen. Anmerkungen zu Schleiermacher und Hegel’, in Integration religiöser Pluralität. Philosophische und theologische Beiträge zum Religionsverständnis in der Moderne, ed. H.-P. Großhans et al. (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2010), 111–23; Notger Slenczka, ‘Religion and the Religions: The Fifth Speech in Dialogue with Contemporary Conceptions of a “Theology of Religions” ’, in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (note 4), 51–67; Andreas Krebs, Friedrich Schleiermacher interkulturell gelesen (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2011), by contrast, sees in Schleiermacher the justification of a perspectivism and pluralism of religious theories, which enables an intercultural and interfaith conversation. 26  KGA I/3, 3–61. 27  KGA I/3, 18. 28  KGA I/4, 27–357. The Grundlinien are not only difficult on account of their composition, but also because they lack a detailed table of contents corresponding to the actual subheadings in the text (which perplexingly, the KGA also does not provide). The analysis of the contents by Otto Braun is helpful, in Schleiermacher: Werke. Auswahl, vol. I, 2nd edition, (Leipzig: Meiner, 1928), CI–CXXVIII. Interpretations specifically of the Grundlinien are rare; alongside the study by Herms (Herkunft, note 5) cf. Claudio Cesa, ‘Schleiermacher critico dell’etica di Kant e di Fichte. Spunti dalle ‘Grundlinien’’,

32   Andreas Arndt completed the project of a ‘critique of morals’ that he had pursued since 1797 and presents, alongside the theory of religion, his most significant contribution to early Romantic ‘symphilosophy’.29 The Grundlinien is divided into three ‘books’ (critique of the highest axioms of ethics; critique of ethical concepts; critique of ethical systems). They are preceded by a general introduction, which lays out the ‘idea’, the ‘limits’, and the sequence and division of the critique. The continuity with early Romanticism is expressed primarily in the question of what constitutes the principle of ethics, which can only be found in a ‘science of the grounds and connection of all sciences’ but which cannot, as Schleiermacher noted critically with a view to Fichte,30 be based ‘on a highest basic proposition . . . but rather must be thought of as a whole, in which any element can be the beginning, and all individual things, though mutually determined, are grounded solely in the whole. This entails that such a science can only be accepted or rejected, but not justified or proven’.31 This figure is apparently related to Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of the ‘alternating principle’ (Wechselerweis) and is based on the idea of a totality in which the elements mutually support each other and can only be developed starting from these elements, and not deductively from a principle.32 The systematic critique is carried out specifically with regard to Kant and Fichte.33 For Schleiermacher, Spinoza has the advantage over Kant of operating in the sphere of an ‘objective’ philosophy, in which Schleiermacher also includes Plato. In contrast to Plato, Spinoza lacks a conception of art, while Plato stands out because of his consideration of the world as a work of art: ‘This is not the place to judge whether the highest science itself is as logical as Spinoza constructed it, or whether, as Plato develops it, merely following a poetic

Archivio di filosofia 52 (1984), 19–34; Omar Brino, L’architettonica della morale. Teoria e storia dell’etica nelle ‘Grundlinien’ di Schleiermacher (Trento: Dipartimento di filosofia, storia e beni culturali, 2007). 29  Cf. Friedrich Schlegel to Schleiermacher, July 1797, KGA V/2, 348. Cf. Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1870), 863: 

In the Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre Schleiermacher secured . . . his own ideas; since he was not indebted to Romanticism for the Ethical, but rather Romanticism was indebted to him. The transition from the fluid form, which those ideas had during the time together with his poetic friends, to the stiff form of strict scientificity, which he had strived for in an early period, appears as a nearly perilous undertaking. 30 

31 

Cf. KGA I/4, 48: 

Such a highest and most universal knowledge would deserve the name of a doctrine of scientific knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), a name which is indisputably preferable to that of philosophy, and the invention of which is perhaps of more merit than the system initially constructed under this name.

KGA I/4, 48. On account of this,Friedrich Schlegel could indeed recognize the Symphilosophie of the Berlin period in the Grundlinien:  32 

Your critique of morals is the most agreeable and most important thing I have received since I left Germany. The style is superb, more educated than in any scholarly work of late. To what extent I agree completely or partially with the content, that you know well enough that I don’t need to write about that. If we could just once again symphilosophize together. (20 March 1804, KGA V/7, 273 sq.). 33  For Schleiermacher, Schelling lacked an ethics, for which reason he is only marginally mentioned in the Grundlinien; cf. ibid., 355 sq.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   33 presupposition’.34 Schleiermacher’s tends, however, in his later works to replace Spinoza with Plato.35 Testing the viability of ethical principles for a system of action leads initially to the ideas of the highest good and the wise man as the poles of the ethical common to all ethical systems. What the wise man embodies in his subjectivity is represented objectively in the highest good and both are connected to each other through the ‘law’ in the form of duty. With that, the threefold division of ethics into the doctrines of goods, virtues, and duties is already given, which will continue to play a decisive role in Schleiermacher’s own drafts of an ethics. Schleiermacher’s Grundlinien deals not only specifically with the system of ethics, but also touches on the question of a system of philosophy in general. Schleiermacher addresses this question explicitly as well in his review of Schelling’s Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums published in 1804.36 He broadly agrees with Schelling’s philosophy of identity, but with the reservation that philosophy has not yet found its conclusive form. His critique is aimed above all at Schelling’s treatment of theology and history.37

2.4  Outline of the Philosophical System in the Halle and Berlin Lectures Schleiermacher incorporated Schelling’s idea of an encyclopaedia of the sciences into his Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn (1808).38 The task of the university is to realize the connection of the sciences through insight into their unity, which is based in reason. This is the task of philosophy, which is hence regarded as the actual spiritual centre of the university. Schleiermacher argues for a close connection of speculation and empiricism; the ‘whole natural organization of science’ is divided, according to Schleiermacher, into ‘the pure transcendental philosophy and the whole natural-scientific and historical side’ (KGA I/6, 54).

34 

KGA I/4, 66. KGA I/4, 66. Although in Autumn 1802, while still writing the Grundlinien, Schleiermacher was thinking of making a literary monument to Spinoza through recourse to Plato: ‘A new Phaedo in which Spinoza is the main figure could be quite nice.’ (KGA I/3, 322). 36  KGA I/4, 461–84. 37  Schleiermacher’s relation to Schelling was strained, more due to personal than substantive reasons. While Schelling tried many times to find some concord with Schleiermacher (in 1801 he even tried to win Schleiermacher as a collaborator on the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, which he was putting together with Hegel. Cf. KGA V/5, XXVI), Schleiermacher kept his distance. Cf. Hermann Süskind, Der Einfluß Schellings auf die Entwicklung von Schleiermachers System (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1909). 38  KGA I/6, 15–100. For the context cf. Schleiermacher et al., Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten, ed. E. Müller, (Leipzig, 1990); Jan Rohls, Schleiermacher und die wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 2009); Andreas Arndt, ‘ “Universitäten in deutschem Sinn”. Schleiermachers Universitätsschrift (1808) im Kontext’, in Krise, Reformen—und Kultur. Preußen vor und nach der Katastrophe von 1806, ed. B. Holtz (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2010), 191–202. 35 

34   Andreas Arndt With the professorship in Halle, Schleiermacher began to work out his own philosophical approach. His starting point is not a doctrine of scientific knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), but rather an original intuition,39 which permeates the two philosophical real sciences, physics (philosophy of nature) and ethics. In this Schleiermacher was in agreement with his friend and colleague in Halle, Henrich Steffens. According to this conception, the ‘highest science’, which Schleiermacher had postulated in 1803 in his Grundlinien, is ‘conserved’ in the real sciences and needs to be addressed within the framework of the real sciences. Schleiermacher maintained this position explicitly in his Berlin lectures on Ethics in 1807/08 as well.40 Schleiermacher’s development of a highest science from 1811 onwards in the Dialectic was not a necessary consequence of Schleiermacher’s philosophy, but was occasioned by the situation of competition with Fichte. Schleiermacher did not think Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre could fulfil the tasks of a highest science. Not until after Schleiermacher’s efforts to have Steffens appointed to a professorship at the University of Berlin failed did he start to develop in his lectures a ‘highest science’ as an alternative to the Wissenschaftslehre, and he recommended his students the ‘introduction’ to Steffen’s Grundzüge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft as a text in agreement with his position.41 With the establishment of Dialectic as a highest science, Schleiermacher’s philosophy finds a structure that later would be projected back onto ancient philosophy, with dialectic being regarded as the highest science, above physics and ethics.42 Whether the triadic structure exhausts Schleiermacher’s outline of his system is a point of contention.43 As opposed to the conventional, broadly recognized triadic structure, one can make a case for a fourfold division, which is otherwise used throughout as a principle of construction, if one takes into account Psychology, which Schleiermacher had lectured on since 1818. In 39  ‘One cannot summarize the original intuition in one sentence, and even if one could, one would become distanced from the historical form and the continuity of the intuition through the further procedure. Hence one must remain directly fixed in the original intuition’ (Schleiermacher, Werke, vol. II, 2nd edition (Leipzig: Meiner, 1927), 82). 40  Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Schleiermachers Philosophie im Kontext idealistischer Systemprogramme. Anmerkungen zur Systemkonzeption in Schleiermachers Vorlesungen zur philosophischen Ethik 1807/08’, Archivio di filosofia 52 (1984), 103–21 (with excerpts from Varnhagen’s lecture notes), here 108ff. From 1807 to the founding of the university in 1810, Schleiermacher continued his teaching activities in private lectures in Berlin and lectured on philosophy, in 1807 on the history of ancient philosophy, 1807/08 on philosophical Ethics, 1808/09 on the theory of the State, and 1809/10 on general hermeneutics. 41  Cf. August Twesten’s preface in Schleiermacher: Grundriß der philosophischen Ethik (Berlin: Reimer, 1841), XCVII. 42  Cf. Schleiermacher, Sämmtliche Werke, Abt. 3, Bd. 4, 1: Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Heinrich Ritter (Berlin: Reimer, 1839) 18. On the historical interpolation cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘ “Ueber den Werth des Sokrates als Philosophen”. Schleiermacher und Sokrates’ in Schleiermacher, Romanticism and the Critical Arts. A Festschrift in Honor of Hermann Patsch, ed. H. Dierkes et al. (Lewiston et al.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 293–302. 43  This threefold structure is also the basis for the model worked out by Hans-Joachim Birkner, which has since achieved a general validity (H.-J. Birkner, Schleiermachers christliche Sittenlehre im Zusammenhang seines philosophisch-theologischen Systems (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964) 36); cf. Gunter Scholtz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 68f. In this model, Philosophy of Nature and Ethics are coordinated with the empirical naturals sciences and history, whereas another series of critical and technical disciplines are connected to Ethics.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   35 this division, Psychology is an empirically based complement to Dialectic.44 The status of the Dialectic as the highest science is also controversial: Eilert Herms has claimed this status first for Ethics and then for Psychology.45 Here one needs to take into consideration that the other disciplines cannot be deduced from the dialectic (even if Schleiermacher uses the expression (deduction) with reference to Ethics46), but rather stand in a relation of mutual determination to each other and to Dialectic.47 Since the first lecture on philosophical ethics in Berlin in the winter term 1812/13 Schleiermacher differentiated between critical and technical disciplines that are connected to Ethics. The essence of critique is the ‘connection of the empirical with speculative exposition’; the technical, by contrast, has to do with the production of empirically oriented knowledge.48 Grammar, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics are named as critical disciplines; didactics, hermeneutics, practical theology, and politics all belong to the technical disciplines. Physics and Ethics are not only mediated on the speculative level through the Dialectic but also on the empirical level through logic and anthropology.49 At the same time there is, with reference to Ethics, a critical method above and beyond the critical disciplines with which the Individual can be brought into connection with the Absolute.50 The tasks of such a ‘higher’ critical discipline are performed at least in part by Psychology, which as a ‘fragment’ of anthropology relates the activity of the soul to the transcendental ground.

2.5 Dialectic Schleiermacher understands the Dialectic not as knowledge of principles, but rather as a Kunstlehre, that is, a theory of the art of philosophizing, or the organon of real knowledge, a conception for which Schleiermacher explicitly appeals to Plato. He also makes multiple

44  Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘ “Spekulative Blicke auf das geistige Prinzip”. Friedrich Schleiermachers Psychologie’, Dialogische Wissenschaft (note 3), 147–61. For a critical view of the fourfold structure justified through this, see Hermann Fischer, Friedrich Schleiermacher (München: Beck, 2001), 84. 45  Eilert Herms, ‘Die Ethik des Wissens beim späten Schleiermacher’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 73 (1976), 471–523; idem, ‘Die Bedeutung der ‘Psychologie’ für die Konzeption des Wissenschaftssystems beim späten Schleiermacher’, in Schleiermacher und die wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums, ed. G. Meckenstock et al. (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1991), 369–401. Herms continues to support the foundational function of psychology in ‘Schleiermacher’s Encyclopedia, Philosophical Ethics, Anthropology, and Dogmatics in German Protestant Theology’, in Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (note 4), 368. 46  Cf. Schleiermacher: Werke, II (note 39), 247f.; while beforehand he states, ‘Since the highest science is only in a state of becoming and only with its completion does a sufficient derivation of the individual sciences become possible, the individual science must . . . begin incomplete’ (Werke, II, 245). 47  Cf. Sarah Schmidt, Die Konstruktion des Endlichen (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2005), chap. 5; Schmidt speaks of an ‘eternally provisional system’ in Schleiermacher, because knowledge on every level remains perpetually in a state of becoming. Cf. also Johannes Michael Dittmer, Schleiermachers Wissenschaftslehre als Entwurf einer prozessualen Metaphysik in semiotischer Perspektive. Triadizität im Werden (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2001). 48 Schleiermacher, Werke, II (note 39), 252. 49 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 506. 50 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 507.

36   Andreas Arndt recourses to the conception of the dialectic that Friedrich Schlegel had already developed in 1796.51 The basic outline of the Dialectic essentially stayed the same since the first lectures in 1811. In the introduction, the concept and task of the dialectic are laid out, followed by the search for the ground of all knowledge in the ‘transcendental part’. This is followed by a second, ‘technical’ or ‘formal’ main part, which addresses the construction and combination of real knowledge. The introduction and transcendental part were revised many times in the course of the later lectures.52 51   Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des Schleiermacherschen Begriffs von Dialektik’, in Schleiermacher und die wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums (note 45), 313–33;Andreas Arndt, ‘Zum Begriff der Dialektik bei Friedrich Schlegel 1796–1801’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 35 (1992), 257–73; Andreas Arndt, ‘Historische Einführung’ in KGA II/10, 1, XXII–XXIV. Schleiermacher also made use of Schlegel’s philosophical notebooks (to A. W. Schlegel, 15 January 1798, KGA V/2, 250) and thus most likely was familiar with the conception of his friend. Josef Körner had argued already in 1934 that Schleiermacher’s Dialectic lets ‘certain thoughts from [Friedrich Schlegel’s] Jena transcendental philosophy shine through’. (‘Einleitung’ in Friedrich Schlegel. Neue philosophische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Gerhard Schulte-Bulmke, 1934), 51.) Peter Grove also emphasizes that Schleiermacher’s Dialectic builds upon Schlegel’s conception. See Deutungen des Subjekts (note 6), 438ff. 52  Of the more recent literature cf. Leendert Oranje, God een Wereld. De vraag naar het transcendentale in Schleiermachers ‘Dialektik’ (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1968); Falk Wagner, Schleiermachers Dialektik. Eine kritische Interpretation (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1974); Hans-Richard Reuter, Die Einheit der Dialektik Schleiermachers. Eine systematische Interpretation (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1979); Udo Kliebisch, Transzendentalphilosophie als Kommunikationstheorie. Eine Interpretation der Dialektik Friedrich Schleiermachers vor dem Hintergrund der Erkenntnistheorie Karl Otto Apels (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1980); Ulrich Barth, Christentum und Selbstbewußtsein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983); Heinz Kimmerle, ‘Schleiermachers Dialektik als Grundlegung philosophisch-theologischer Systematik und als Ausgangspunkt offener Wechselseitigkeit’, in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß, ed. Kurt-Victor Selge, (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1984), 39–59; Andreas Arndt ‘Unmittelbarkeit als Reflexion. Voraussetzungen der Dialektik Friedrich Schleiermachers’, in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß, 469–84; Mario Gaetano Lombardo, La regola del giudizio. La deduzione trascendentale nella dialettica e nell’etica di Fr. Schleiermacher (Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1990); Andreas Arndt, ‘Dialettica romantica. Friedrich Schlegel e Schleiermacher’, Fenomenologia e società 15 (1992), 85–107; Walter Jaeschke, ‘I limiti della ragione nella dialettica di Schleiermacher’, Fenomenologia e società 15, 109–18; Sergio Sorrentino, ‘Filosofia trascendentale e dialettica nella cultura idealistico-romantica. I presupposti della ‘Dialektik’ di Schleiermacher’, Fenomenologia e società 15 (1992) 119–45; S. Sorrentino et al., eds., La dialettica nella cultura romantica (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1996); Ingolf Hübner, Wissenschaftsbegriff und Theologieverständnis. Eine Untersuchung zu Schleiermachers Dialektik (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1997); Christian Berner et al., ‘La dialectique ou l’art de philosopher’ in Schleiermacher: Dialectique (Paris: Cerf, 1997), 7–38; Bela Bacso, ‘ “Zurückdrängung der metaphysischen Anmaßung”. Metaphysikkritik in Schleiermachers Dialektik’, in Grundlinien der Vernunftkritik, ed. C. Jamme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 175–83; Manfred Frank, ‘Einleitung des Herausgebers’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher: Dialektik, I. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 10–136; Ch. Helmer et al., eds., Schleiermachers ‘Dialektik’. Die Liebe zum Wissen in Philosophie und Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2003); Peter Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts (note 6), chap. II C; Sarah Schmidt, Die Konstruktion des Endlichen (note 47), chap. 3; Manfred Frank, ‘Metaphysical foundations: a look at Schleiermacher’s Dialectic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. J. Mariña, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 15–34; Guido Kreis, ‘Schleiermachers negative Dialektik’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 112 (2005), 359–79; Giovanni D’Aniello, Una ontologia dialettica. Fondamento e autoscienza in Schleiermacher (Bari: Pagina, 2007); Friedrich Kümmel, Schleiermachers Dialektik (Hechingen: Vardan, 2008).

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   37 The Dialectic starts from the premise that the foundations of knowledge themselves are in dispute. Thus the dialectic aims ‘to construct a doctrine of the art of disputation (Kunstlehre des Streitens), in the hope that through this one can reach the common premises for knowledge.’ (KGA II/10, 1, 372). The starting point is not disputed real knowledge.53 Hence the dialectic, irrespective of its transcendental philosophical approach, cannot be merely formal, but rather must also reflect the relation of knowledge to being; it is accordingly the unity of logic and metaphysics.54 The dialectic does not emerge, however, as a science, but rather as a Kunstlehre, which aims to ‘make’ the ‘inner connection of all knowledge’ (KGA II/10, 1, 75), which it, however, does not yet possess. The dialectic is knowledge in a state of becoming in a double sense: the becoming of real knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge. Its real goal is thus the construction of real knowledge, as developed in the second, technical part, and not the completion of pure or philosophical thinking in itself. For Schleiermacher knowledge is that kind of thinking, which (a) ‘is produced in the same way by all who are capable of thought’ and which (b) ‘is represented mentally as corresponding to the being of the object of thought’ (KGA II/10, 1, 90). In all thinking the two sides, the organic and the intellectual, need to be differentiated.55 Both the ideal and the real are modes of being56 and form ‘the highest opposition’, which is to be regarded as the ‘upper’ boundary of thought and should be reduced to a non-relational identity. In this conception, knowledge is then limited to the realm of opposition, where it stands under the forms of the concept and the judgement.57 According to Schleiermacher, certainty in knowledge and action is grounded in feeling, because non-relational being cannot be known. In the 1822 lectures feeling is addressed as ‘immediate self-consciousness’, which stands in ‘analogy’ to the transcendent ground.58 Schleiermacher determines the transcendental ground as the unconditioned or absolute as the idea of God; its correlative idea is the ideal of the world as the idea of the totality of the conditioned, in which everything ‘stands in the form of the opposition’.59 This too lies ‘outside our real knowledge’, because the totality is never completed (KGA II/10, 1, 147f.). While the idea of God is determined as the terminus a quo of knowledge, the idea of the world is the ‘transcendental terminus ad quem and the principle of the actuality of knowledge in its state of becoming’ (KGA II/10, 1, 149).

53 

Cf. KGA II/10, 1, 83; according to Schleiermacher, the possibility of real knowledge is only disputed by scepticism, which in doing so commits the self-contradiction of asserting a knowledge of non-knowledge (KGA II/10, 1, 87). 54  Cf. KGA II/10, 1, 77. In which sense one can speak of ontology and metaphysics as transcendental philosophical prerequisities in Schleiermacher has yet to be sufficiently clarified. 55  Here it is not hard to recognize Kant’s branches of knowledge—sensibility and the understanding—and Kant’s idea of the necessary relation of concepts to experience. 56  Cf. KGA II/10, 1, 100. 57  For Schleiermacher, the syllogism is not, as in the traditional formal logic, an independent form, but rather only a combination of judgements; on this cf. Friedrich Ueberweg, System der Logik und Geschichte der logischen Lehren, 4th edition (Bonn: Marcus, 1882), 61–3. 58  Cf. KGA II/10, 1, 266. Whether this immediacy actually includes acts of reflection, is a point of debate. Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Unmittelbarkeit als Reflexion’ (note 2), 469–84. 59  Cf. KGA I/10, 1, 49.

38   Andreas Arndt The second, technical part of the Dialectic examines the conscious bringing forth of knowledge in construction and combination. Construction deals with the formation of concepts and judgements and explains how a given (and with that receptively discerned) thing is brought into the form of knowledge. Combination deals with the heuristics and architectonic of knowledge and explains how to extend already existing knowledge (heuristics), or the type of internal connection that the already present knowledge is to be brought into (architectonic). Construction and combination as well as the techniques they encompass are only relatively distinct and continually intervene in each other in practice in the knowledge process. Since the process aimed at the idea of the world can never reach completion, each state of knowledge remains relative to and dependent upon individuality, which as an ‘irrational’ moment needs to be compensated for critically through the unity of language and the unity of reason.

2.6 Ethics Schleiermacher’s Ethics can be regarded as the real centre of his philosophical work, but even the ethics did not find a completed exposition.60 Ethics is conceived of as an ‘objective’ philosophy, which mediates the individual and the universal.61 Ethics as the ‘science of history’62 is ‘description of the laws of human action’. The content of this action is the ‘animation of human nature through reason’.63 The determination of the highest good results 60 

Cf. Hans-Joachim Birkner, ‘Einleitung’, in Schleiermacher: Ethik (1812/13) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981), XIV–XXII; the writings for the Academy are in KGA I/11. 61  Franz Vorländer, Schleiermachers Sittenlehre ausführlich dargestellt und beurtheilt mit einer einleitenden Exposition des historischen Entwicklungsganges der Ethik überhaupt (Marburg: Elwert, 1851); Poul Henning Jørgensen, Die Ethik Schleiermachers (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1959); HansJoachim Birkner, Schleiermachers christliche Sittenlehre im Zusammenhang seines philosophischtheologischen Systems (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964); Giovanni Moretto, Etica e storia in Schleiermacher (Naples: Bibliopolis,1979); Christel Keller-Wentorf, Schleiermachers Denken. Die Bewußtseinslehre in Schleiermachers philosophischer Ethik als Schlüssel zu seinem Denken (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1984); Jean-Pierre Wils, Sittlichkeit und Subjektivität. Zur Ortsbestimmung der Ethik im Strukturalismus, in der Subjektivitätsphilosophie und bei Schleiermacher (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1987); Sergio Sorrentino, ‘Natur- und Vernunftkausalität. Schleiermachers Ethik als Thematisierung von Humanität’, in Schleiermacher und die wissenschaftliche Kultur des Christentums (note 45), 493–508; Michael Moxter, Güterbegriff und Handlungstheorie. Eine Studie zur Ethik F. Schleiermachers (Kampen: Pharos, 1992); Tobias Berben, ‘Praktische Vernunft und Individualität. Schleiermachers Ethik als Theorie konventioneller Moralität’, in Dialogische Wissenschaft (note 3), 163–85; Brent Sockness, ‘The Forgotten Moralist. Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Science of Spirit’, Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003), 317–48; Michael Feil, Die Grundlegung der Ethik bei Schleiermacher und Thomas von Aquin (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2005); Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Schleiermacher’s ethics’ in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (note 52), 53–71. 62  Schleiermacher’s thinking of history has yet to be sufficiently examined; cf. Wilhelm Gräb, Humanität und Christentumsgeschichte. Eine Untersuchung zum Geschichtsbegriff im Spätwerk Schleiermachers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980); Simon Gerber, ‘Geschichte und Kirchengeschichte bei Schleiermacher’, Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 17 (2010), 34–55. 63 Schleiermacher, Werke, II (note 39), 87. Cf. Eilert Herms, ‘‘‘Beseelung der Natur durch die Vernunft”. Eine Untersuchung der Einleitung zu Schleiermachers Ethikvorlesungen von 1805/06’, Archivio di filosofia 52 (1984), 42–102.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   39 from this, whereas the idea of a complete animation is just an ideal, since it lies in the area of the idea of the world as conceptualized in the Dialectic. It is the task of the Dialectic, not Ethics, to justify this idea in a real sense. The Ethics is divided according to the classic scheme into doctrines of goods, virtues, and duties, whereby the latter has the actions of individuals as its subject, while the doctrine of goods addresses the functions, forms, and areas of the activities of reason in history as the formation of reason in and though nature. It marks, as Schleiermacher says, a ‘framework’64 of the activities of reason, which stand in interaction without negating each other. Here Schleiermacher differentiates between two modes of the action of reason: the organization as the formation of nature into an organ of reason on the one hand, and the symbolization as the use of this organ in the action of reason on the other. Both functions can be further differentiated according to whether individualization or the community predominates, which then results in the following fourfold scheme: identical organization signifies the social relation of nature and the corresponding forms of intercourse (labour, division of labour, exchange); individual organization private property and the private sphere; identical symbolization the field of knowledge; and the individual symbolization the areas of emotion (art, religion). These four spheres of action correspond to the institutions of the state, free sociability, the academy, and the church. The doctrines of virtues and duties address the ethical nature (Sittlichkeit) of the individual, who is regarded from the outset as part of the ethical whole. The doctrine of duties points out the dynamic in the individual ethical actions themselves; it is the ‘exposition of the ethical process as movement, and hence the unity of the moment and the act’. 65 The doctrine of duties mediates between the doctrines of virtues and goods by relating the individuality of the individual described in the doctrine of virtues to the communal nature already presupposed by the doctrine of goods. With its central notion of the animation of nature through reason, Schleiermacher’s Ethics represents a comprehensive theory of culture.66 Beyond the terminological and substantive differences to Hegel’s concept of Spirit,67 Hegel’s theory of objective Spirit is the sole comparable contemporary attempt at such a theory, also with regard to the integration of civil society and its forms of intercourse (labour, division of labour, and exchange).68

64 Schleiermacher, Werke, II (note 39), 90.

65 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 166. Cf. Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995); on the Ethics as a theory of culture, also with regard to Hegel, see 35–64; cf. also Sarah Schmidt, ‘Kulturkritik als geschichtliches Verstehen in Friedrich Schleiermachers Ethik’, in Kulturwissenschaften in Europa—eine grenzüberschreitende Disziplin?, ed. A. Allerkamp et al. (Münster: LIT, 2010), 39–55. 67  Cf. Martin Diederich, Schleiermachers Geistverständnis. Eine systematisch-theologische Untersuchung seiner philosophischen und theologischen Rede vom Geist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). 68  Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Tauschen und Sprechen. Zur Rezeption der bürgerlichen Ökonomie in der philosophischen Ethik Friedrich Schleiermachers 1805/06, dargestellt aufgrund einer unveröffentlichten Vorlesungsnachschrift’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 91 (1984), 357–76. 66 

40   Andreas Arndt

2.7  Individual Disciplines (Aesthetics, Theory of the State, Pedagogy, Hermeneutics, Psychology) As mentioned in section 2.6, a circle of critical and technical disciples are connected to ethics. Of these Schleiermacher discussed in lectures and in treatises written for the Academy of Sciences the following: Aesthetics and the Theory of the State as critical disciplines; Pedagogy and Hermeneutics as technical disciplines.69 Further, in the Ethics Schleiermacher mentions the empirical study of history, which stands in relation to ethics as a ‘picture book’ does to a ‘book of formulae’, but which Schleiermacher did not further elaborate.70 The place of Aesthetics as a critical discipline is clearly demarcated: art belongs to the activity of individual symbolization qua feeling and thus stands in the closest possible proximity to religion.71 Aesthetics itself has the task of deducing the ‘cycle of the arts’ from this foundation and of giving an exposition of the ‘essence of the various art forms’.72 At the centre is the exposition of particularity (das Eigentümliche), which is represented here as self-manifestation.73 From this vantage point, Schleiermacher’s Aesthetics is essentially an aesthetics of artistic production.74 The exposition of the individual arts follows the transition from the subjectivity of feeling to objectively directed representation. The accompanying arts (mime and music) are closest to subjective feeling, while the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), due to a cognitively directed imagination, form the objective counterpoint as reformulations of the beauty of nature. Both are related to each other through the verbal arts (poetry, drama, the novel), which in their specific ways comprise the whole spectrum of possibilities of expression. 69  Siehe KGA I/11; from the lectures, only the theory of the state has been published in a critical edition (KGA II/8). 70 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, (note 39), 549. 71  Cf. Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 99f. 72 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 366. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ästhetik in Sämmtliche Werke 3, 7, ed. Carl Lommatzsch (Berlin: Reimer, 1842). Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher Ästhetik, ed. R. Odebrecht (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1931); a partial edition on the basis of this one is to be found in Schleiermacher, Ästhetik. Über den Begriff der Kunst, ed. T. Lehnerer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1984). A critical edition is still lacking; on the deficits of all the editions up to now, cf. A. Arndt und W. Virmond, review of ‘F.D.E. Schleiermacher: Ästhetik. Über den Begriff der Kunst, hg. v. Th. Lehnerer, Hamburg 1984’, New Athenaeum/Neues Athenaeum 2 (1991), 190–6. 73  Cf. Rudolf Odebrecht, Schleiermachers System der Ästhetik. Grundlegung und problemgeschichtliche Sendung (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1932); Gunter Scholtz, Schleiermachers Musikphilosophie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981); Thomas Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987); Paolo D’Angelo, ‘Introduzione’, in Schleiermacher: Estetica (Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 1988), 25–33; Reinold Schmücker, ‘Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Kunstphilosophie’, in Dialogische Wissenschaft (note 3), 241–65; Anne Käfer, ‘Die wahre Ausübung der Kunst ist religiös’. Schleiermachers Ästhetik im Kontext der zeitgenössischen Entwürfe Kants, Schillers und Friedrich Schlegels (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 74  Cf. Gunter Scholtz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 141f.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   41 The Theory of the State plays a prominent role in the technical disciplines; its aim is not to develop a normative concept of the state, but rather to provide a ‘physiology’ of the state (KGA II/8, 758). The Ethics already had situated the state in the sphere of ‘identical organization’. The state is not the ‘highest idea’, but rather ‘culture raised to the highest power’.75 The real task of the state is communal production in relation to nature, that is, the sphere of the economy. With that, questions of the constitution, law, and politics are secondary for Schleiermacher:  The constitution does not make the state; much less its outer form, whether monarchical, etc. . . . If the constitution made the state, England would be a mere negative state. The state is, however, much older than the constitution; it lives in the associations and corporations, the improving societies, the East India Company, banks, etc. and in legislation.76

In keeping with a tradition reaching up to Kant, Schleiermacher places civil society (as societas civilis) on the same level with the ‘state’ (as civitas), whereby he restricts the political role of the citizen to that of a state subject.77 The Theory of the State is divided into three sections: state constitution, administration, and defence, where ‘constitution’ here is not meant in the sense of a written constitution, but as the institutional solidification and legalization of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the process of the development of culture. The second, material part is politics, which addresses state administration and how it is determined through the organization of the economy. If the latter predominates, then the state becomes an ‘industrious state’ (as opposed to a ‘military state’, in which defence of the state as discussed in part three is the guiding principle). Education and finance policy are further basic areas of state administration. The inner and outer state defence finally comprises domestic justice, foreign war, and diplomacy. The activity of the state can be reduced in the course of civilizatory progress and finally disappear completely. The character of Schleiermacher’s theory of the state and its place in its contemporary theoretical context are disputed just as much as the tendency of Schleiermacher’s political activity in the Prussian reform process.78 In the sphere of politics, Schleiermacher stresses 75 Schleiermacher, Werke, II (note 39), 110. 77 

76 Schleiermacher, Werke, II, 145.

Cf. Günther Holstein, Die Staatsphilosophie Schleiermachers (Bonn et al.: Schroeder, 1923); Erich Foerster, ‘Der Organismusbegriff bei Kant und bei Schleiermacher und seine Anwendung auf den Staat’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche New Series 12 (1931), 407–21; Jörg Dierken ‘Staat bei Schleiermacher und Hegel: Staatsphilosophische Antipoden?’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur (note 15), 395–410. 78  For a comprehensive treatment, see Matthias Wolfes, Öffentlichkeit und Bürgergesellschaft. Friedrich Schleiermachers politische Wirksamkeit, two volumes (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2004); cf. Walter Jaeschke, in KGA II/8, XXVII; Dankfried Reetz, ‘Schleiermacher mit “politischer Tendenz”?—Schleiermachers Politik-Vorlesungen des Sommersemesters 1817’, Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 7 (2000), 205–50; idem, Schleiermacher im Horizont preußischer Politik. Studien und Dokumente zu Schleiermachers Berufung nach Halle, zu seiner Vorlesung über Politik 1817 und zu den Hintergründen der Demagogenverfolgung (Waltrop: Hartmut Spenner, 2002). For a critique of this, see the review by Andreas Arndt: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/ id=3209. Other studies come to the conclusion that while one can affirm that Schleiermacher had liberal convictions, these were not worked out theoretically, so that, for example, the theory of the state cannot be counted as a liberal theory. Cf. Denis Thouard, ‘Gefühl und Freiheit in politischer Hinsicht. Einige Überlegungen zu Humboldt, Constant, Schleiermacher und ihrem Verhältnis zum Liberalismus’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur (note 15), 355–74. By contrast, Matthias Wolfes

42   Andreas Arndt conviction, while the institution and legal formalization of political and social structures recedes almost completely into the background, as is clearly shown in Schleiermacher’s non-engagement with the broad discussion of the Prussian constitution, which evidently he did not see as a problem: ‘The development of the state is its present condition (Zustand); and this is in fact the constitution; one usually, however, thinks of a written document (upon which I lay little value)’.79 For Schleiermacher, Pedagogy80 is a technical discipline, which develops a technical doctrine of educational practice building upon Ethics. The pedagogical process is based on the characteristics of human nature of receptivity and spontaneity; the first is broadened to a ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung), while the latter is led to active participation in the perfection of the ethical in the sense of an ‘education of the world’ (Weltbildung). The family, school, vocational training, and the university are the institutions in which this educational process is carried out, whereby each of these institutions forms a focal point of the successive phases that correspond to the natural course of individual development. In this concept, the pinnacle of the pedagogical process is the philosophically grounded interconnection of all knowledge and action, which it is the task of the university to bring about.81 Among the technical disciplines that Schleiermacher lectured on, Hermeneutics is certainly the best known due to the particular attention it received in the twentieth century.82 regards Schleiermacher as a ‘forefather of liberal democracy’ (‘Sichtweisen. Schleiermachers politische Theorie zwischen dem autoritären Nationalstaatsethos der Befreiungskriegszeit und dem deliberativen Konzept einer bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur, 393). See also Matthias Wolfes, ‘Konstruktion der Freiheit. Die Idee einer bürgerschaftlichen politischen Kultur im staatstheoretischen Denken Friedrich Schleiermachers’, in Krise, Reformen—und Kultur, ed. B. Holtz (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2010), 227–48. 79  KGA II/8, 855 (Kolleg 1833. Nachschrift Waitz); cf. Schleiermacher’s manuscript, KGA II/8, 191. A comparable abstinence from the institutionalization of politics and the codification of law can be found in Schleiermacher’s contemporary Jakob Friedrich Fries, with whom he also shares an education by the Moravian Brethren. 80  Carl Platz’s edition in the Sämmtliche Werke (Abt. 3, Bd. 9, Berlin: Reimer 1849) drew upon Schleiermacher’s manuscripts and his students’ lecture notes, and has served as the basis for all the later editions and partial publications, since the manuscripts that Platz used are no longer available. Supplementing this, there are the excerpts from lecture notes that Adolph Diesterweg provided in 1835 (Rheinische Blätter 11, 1835, 3–25), reprinted in Schleiermacher: Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996), 789–801; as well as the edition of the lectures from 1820/21 by Christiane Ehrhardt and Wolfgang Virmond: Schleiermacher: Pädagogik. Die Theorie der Erziehung von 1820/21 in einer Nachschrift (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2008). 81 Schleiermacher’s Pedagogy first had a comprehensive reception in the twentieth century, whereby Schleiermacher was given the status of a classic. Cf. Michael Winkler, ‘Einleitung’ in Schleiermacher: Texte zur Pädagogik, I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), VII–LXXXIV; Jens Brachmann, ‘Chronologische Bibliographie zur “Erziehungslehre” Friedrich Schleiermachers’, in Schleiermacher in der Pädagogik, ed. J. Hopfner (Würzburg: Ergon, 2001), 171–95. 82  Cf. Gianni Vattimo, Schleiermacher. Filosofo dell’interpretazione (Milan: Mursia, 1968); Peter Szondi, ‘Schleiermachers Hermeneutik heute’, Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 58 (1976), 95–111; Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine. Textstrukturierung und –interpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977); Reiner Wiehl, ‘Schleiermachers Hermeneutik—Ihre Bedeutung für die Philologie in Theorie und Praxis’, in Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Flashar et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck § Ruprecht, 1979), 32–67; Sergio Sorrentino, Ermeneutica e filosofia trascendentale. La filosofia di Schleiermacher come progretto di comprensione dell’altro (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1986); Reinhold Rieger, Interpretation und Wissen. Zur philosophischen Begründung der Hermeneutik

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   43 At the same time, the place of Hermeneutics in Schleiermacher’s system was mostly ignored, while to a large extent his whole philosophy, and his Dialectic, was put into a hermeneutic perspective.83 From 1805 on, Schleiermacher lectured on Hermeneutics in Halle und Berlin.84 That Schleiermacher drew upon Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘philosophy of philology’ as a resource for his conceptualization of Hermeneutics—as he also did in his Dialectic—is undisputed.85 Corresponding to the two sides of the task of hermeneutics—analysis of the objective linguistic context and reconstruction of the author’s individual intentions and methods of composition—hermeneutics is divided into a more objective grammatical and a more subjective psychological or technical part. With that, two methods come to bear: the comparative method, which starts from the already known and through comparison clarifies that which is not yet understood; and the divinatory method, which anticipates contexts or connections. Here as well the objective element is dominant in the comparative method, while divination operates with the subjective intuition of the interpreter. Both methods are, just as with grammatical and psychological (technical) interpretation, dependent upon each bei Friedrich Schleiermacher und ihrem geschichtlichen Hintergrund (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1988); Lutz Danneberg, ‘Schleiermachers Hermeneutik im historischen Kontext—mit einem Blick auf ihre Rezeption’, in Dialogische Wissenschaft (note 3), 81–105; Harald Schnur, Schleiermachers Hermeneutik und ihre Vorgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart et al.: Metzler, 1994); Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 83  This was done first by Rudolf Odebrecht, who regarded hermeneutics as the (equally entitled) ‘counterpart of dialectics’. Both disciplines are ‘fundamental doctrines of the actuality of human being’ (‘Einleitung’ in Schleiermacher: Dialektik (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1942, XXIII)). Cf. Karl Pohl, ‘Die Bedeutung der Sprache für den Erkenntnisakt in der ‘Dialektik’ Friedrich Schleiermachers’, Kant-Studien 46 (1954/55), 302–32; Dietrich Böhler, ‘Das dialogische Prinzip als hermeneutische Maxime’, Man and World 11 (1978), 131–64; Wolfgang Hinrichs, ‘Standpunktfrage und Gesprächsmodell. Das vergessene Elementarproblem der hermeneutisch-dialektischen Wissenschaftstheorie seit Schleiermacher’, in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß, Berlin 1984 (note 52), 513–38; Wolfgang H. Pleger, Schleiermachers Philosophie (note 3), chap. IV: ‘Eine Theorie des Gesprächs—Der Zusammenhang von Anthropologie, Dialektik und Hermeneutik’; Potepa succinctly speaks of Schleiermacher’s ‘hermeneutical dialectic’ (Maciej Potepa, Schleiermachers hermeneutische Dialektik (Kampen: Pharos, 1996)). 84  While the Hermeneutics in Halle were oriented toward theology, one of the private lectures held in 1809/10 before the opening of the University of Berlin should be regarded as philosophical. The 1814 lectures were divided into a philosophical and a theological part and were accordingly offered at both faculties, while the other courses were assigned to the theology faculty. Schleiermacher himself had only published on hermeneutics in his treatises for the Academy of Sciences; cf. KGA I/11. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik mit besonderer Beziehung auf das Neue Testament, Sämmtliche Werke, Abt. 1, Bd. 7, ed. F. Lücke (Berlin: Reimer, 1838); also the basis for the edition Schleiermacher: Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, ed. M. Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977); a new edition is Schleiermacher: Hermeneutik. Nach den Handschriften, ed. H. Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Winter, 1959) (2nd, revised edition 1974); supplementing this is the recently discovered manuscript, Allgemeine Hermeneutik (1809/10), ed. W. Virmond, in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß, Berlin 1984 (note 52), 1269–310. Cf. now the new critical edition (KGA II/4). 85  Cf. Hermann Patsch, ‘Friedrich Schlegels ‘Philosophie der Philologie’ und Schleiermachers frühe Entwürfe zur Hermeneutik’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 63 (1966), 434–72; Manuel Bauer, Schlegel und Schleiermacher. Frühromantische Kunstkritik und Hermeneutik (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2011).

44   Andreas Arndt other, in so far as neither can the objective mediations be fully grasped (for Schleiermacher this would have absolute knowledge of the ‘world’ as a prerequisite), nor individuality fully exhausted. On this basis, understanding becomes an infinite, never ending task, as is evidenced in an intensified form in the much-discussed problem of the ‘hermeneutic circle’.86 Schleiermacher specifies the relation of hermeneutics to dialectic as one of mutual dependency. Hermeneutics, however, does not constitute knowledge and thus is only an auxiliary discipline for the dialectic.87 Schleiermacher did not assign Psychology a specific place in his system of philosophical disciplines; it stands in a relation of tension both to Ethics and Physics (philosophy of nature) and to Dialectic. Schleiermacher divides psychology into an elementary part and a constructive part. The elementary part deals with the basic functions of human life, the constructive part aims on this basis to ‘show the individualities, the simple and the complex’, for example, a people or the human species.88 The starting point is the self-conscious human’s living ‘I’. It is based on two elementary functions, the ‘spontaneous’ or ‘outwardflowing’ activity, thus the original self-activity on the one hand, and the ‘receptive’ or ‘discerning’ activity on the other. In the receptive activity the senses are dominant at first, which in contrast to animals already open up to the totality of the world and through feeling enact a self-relation.89 Self-consciousness completes itself in an aesthetic and a religious feeling. For Psychology, this entails the supposition of an ‘unmediated orientation’ of the activity of the soul ‘toward the infinite’, which announces itself as the ‘absolute feeling of dependency’, as the dependency on something ‘that we cannot react against’, on an infinite or absolute being.90

2.8 Conclusion Schleiermacher’s philosophical system is not systematic in the sense of a closed system; even the Dialectic is not a prima philosophia like Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: one cannot deduce the particular disciplines from its principles. Schleiermacher’s general attempt is the balance of speculation and empiricism, and this attempt is to be realized by oscillating

86 

First in the wake of Heidegger and Gadamer, was the ‘hermeneutic circle’ stylized into a fundamental aporia, and separated from the speculative justification of knowledge in Schleiermacher. Cf. Gunter Scholtz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 149ff. 87  Cf. Andreas Arndt, ‘Dialektik und Hermeneutik. Zur kritischen Vermittlung der Disziplinen bei Schleiermacher’, Synthesis philosophica 12, 1 (1997), 39–63; Andreas Arndt, ‘Das Verhältnis von Hermeneutik und Dialektik im Denken Schleiermachers’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur (note 15), 637–49. 88  Arndt, ‘Das Verhältnis von Hermeneutik und Dialektik im Denken Schleiermachers’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur, 501. 89  Cf. Arndt, ‘Das Verhältnis von Hermeneutik und Dialektik im Denken Schleiermachers’, 425; also on the following. 90  Andreas Arndt, ‘Das Verhältnis von Hermeneutik und Dialektik im Denken Schleiermachers’, in Christentum—Staat—Kultur (note 15), 522; cf. 492.

Schleiermacher (1768–1834)   45 between them. Likewise the systematic coherence of the system must be realized by oscillating between the more speculative and the more empirical disciplines; one needs the other and vice versa and the centre of the system is not one basic discipline, for example the Dialectic, but the common gravitational centre of all disciplines. This is a unique position in the area of philosophical systems after Kant. (Translated by Anita Mage, Berlin.)

Bibliography Arndt, Andreas, ‘Kommentar’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher:  Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996), 993–1279. Arndt, Andreas, ed., Wissenschaft und Geselligkeit. Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin 1796– 1802 (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2009). Arndt, Andreas, Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2013). Berner, Christian, La philosophie de Schleiermacher (Paris: Cerf, 1995). Brandt, Richard B., The Philosophy of Schleiermacher:  The Development of His Theory of Scientific and Religious Knowledge (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1968). Burdorf, Dieter et  al., eds., Dialogische Wissenschaft. Perspektiven der Philosophie Schleiermachers (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998). Crouter, Richard, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Dilthey, Wilhelm, Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Reimer, 1871); 2nd, expanded edition, ed. H. Mulert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922); 3rd, expanded edition, ed. M. Redeker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966). Fischer, Hermann, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Munich: Beck, 2001). Grove, Peter, Deutungen des Subjekts. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2004). Herms, Eilert, Menschsein im Werden. Studien zu Schleiermacher (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Mariña, Jacqueline, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Nowak, Kurt, Schleiermacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). Nowak, Kurt, Schleiermacher und die Frühromantik (Weimar: Böhlau, 1986). Pleger, Wolfgang H., Schleiermachers Philosophie (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 1988). Redeker, Martin, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, translated by John Wallhausser from the 1968 German edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1973). Schmidt, Sarah, Die Konstruktion des Endlichen. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Wechselwi­ rkung (Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2005). Scholtz, Gunter, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesel­ lschaft, 1984). Scholtz, Gunter, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswisse­ nschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). Selge, Kurt-Victor, ed., Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß (Berlin et  al.:  de Gruyter, 1984). Sykes, Stephen, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971).

Chapter 3

Hegel (17 70 –1831) Paul Redding 3.1  Life and Times Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, and coming to philosophical maturity in the first years of the nineteenth century, Hegel went on to become perhaps the major figure of ‘German idealism’—a movement that dominated German philosophy in the first third of that century. Hegel’s formal introduction to philosophy was as a student at the seminary (Stift) at Tübingen from 1788 to 1793, where he studied philosophy for two years and then theology for three, and formed close relationships with fellow seminarians Friedrich W. J. Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. After the Stift, the three kept in touch and collaborated, and among the philosophies that inspired them was a version of the ‘transcendental’ idealism of Immanuel Kant, particularly as it appeared in Johann G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre in 1794. However, enthusiasm for such a philosophy that promised to restore human freedom to a generation feeling the threat of the scientific deterministic worldview of modernity was tempered by the concern that it did this at the expense of an unwanted experiential and epistemic ‘alienation’ from the natural and social world, an alienation perceived as reflecting something peculiar about life in modernity. It was this that was partially responsible for the revived interest in the life and thought of the ancient Greek polis, which was conceived as exhibiting a type of immediacy and identity of the self’s relation to the world that had since become lost. These issues had been brought to a head by the experience of the course of the French Revolution, which the three had enthusiastically observed from the distance of Tübingen. Eventually, however, they came to feel the force of Friedrich Schiller’s diagnostic linking of the revolution’s descent into terror with the abstractions of Kant’s philosophy.1 In the early 1790s a Kantian movement in philosophy had emerged in the university town of Jena owing to the influence there of Karl L. Reinhold, who had aimed to render Kant’s doctrines more systematic. This gave rise to two distinct forms of ‘post-Kantianism’. On the one hand, ‘Jena romantics’ such as brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel,

1  F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

Hegel (1770–1831)   47 Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), and others accepted Kant’s claim that the knowledge to which traditional metaphysics aspired was beyond the powers of humans.2 But for them, this demotion of systematic philosophy meant the promotion of more direct forms of awareness and consciousness of the world, such as those of literature and religion. In contrast, Reinhold’s successor in Jena, Fichte, aimed at a restoration of systematic philosophical science in terms of a more general form of idealism that remained true to the ‘spirit’ if not the ‘letter’ of Kant. Both Hölderlin and Schelling had been attracted to Jena in the mid-1790s, with Schelling establishing himself there as a philosophical presence. Hegel, having found employment as a tutor in households in Bern and then Frankfurt after leaving the Stift, eventually joined Schelling in Jena in 1801.3 Between 1801 and 1806 Hegel taught at Jena, first as an unsalaried ‘Privatdozent’, and experimented with ways of constructing his philosophical system. By the end of 1806 he had completed the first mature expression of his distinctive philosophy, the Phenomenology of Spirit, but by the time of its publication in 1807, he had been left jobless by the closing of the university after Napoleon’s troops had occupied the town. For the next nine years Hegel worked outside the university context, first as a newspaper editor at Bamberg, and then as headmaster of a ‘Gymnasium’ (high school) at Nuremberg, but this did not prevent him from publishing the two volumes of his Science of Logic (‘Volume One, The Objective Logic’ made up of books 1 and 2, published separately in 1812 and 1813, and ‘Volume Two, The Subjective Logic’ published in 1816). In 1816 an appointment at the University of Heidelberg marked his return to academic philosophy and two years later he accepted the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work prepared for teaching in which an abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic (the ‘Encyclopedia Logic’ or ‘Lesser Logic’) led into the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin, Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg and ultimately grounded in the section of the Philosophy of Spirit dealing with ‘objective spirit’. During the years up to his death in 1831 Hegel came to enjoy great celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the Encyclopedia in 1827 and 1830. From 1832 versions of his various lecture courses started to appear in print, with second editions appearing in 1840. Tolstoy’s reminiscences of his university days in Russia in the 1840s give a sense of the scope of Hegel’s influence in that decade: ‘Hegelianism was the foundation of everything. It was floating in the air; it was expressed in newspaper and periodical articles, in historical and judicial lectures, in novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation’.4 But already in the 1830s Hegel’s followers were starting to fragment over the question of religion, and from 1841 Hegel’s philosophy was being attacked from his own lectern in Berlin by his former friend and colleague, Schelling. The collapse of progressive politics with the failure of the 1848 revolutions is often said to have deprived Hegelianism of its support, but 2 

M. Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). 3  For a detailed account of Hegel’s life and times, see T. Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4  Count L. Tolstoy, What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow (New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co, 1887), 170.

48   Paul Redding whatever its cause the decline of Hegel’s influence was dramatic. As Tolstoy goes on, ‘all at once the forties passed, and there was nothing left of him. There was not even a hint of him, any more than if he had never existed’.5 In the second half of the century ‘Left-Hegelianism’ eventually transformed into Marx’s claim to invert Hegel’s idealism into a form of materialism which nevertheless kept the ‘dialectical’ form of his thought. However, Marx’s materialism was only one expression of a wide-spread turn against idealism. What exactly had been its perceived problems have by now largely been forgotten, and certain common misconceptions of idealism have made it difficult to appreciate what had seemed attractive about such a form of philosophy.

3.1.1  What was ‘Idealismus’? Within the analytic tradition, the term ‘idealism’ is typically associated with the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley, but attempting to understand the German tradition from such a starting point is hopeless. Berkeley had characterized his own position as ‘immaterialism’, not idealism, and immaterialism was not a significant feature of any version of German idealism. It might be said that the core difference between ‘idealism’ as understood in Anglophone philosophy and the Germans’ Idealismus resides in the difference between the ways each tradition conceived of the nature of the ‘ideas’ referred to by these respective names. Crucially, in the German tradition ‘Idee’ (plural, ‘Ideen’) did not refer to the sort of subjective mental representations that Berkeley, in common with the British empiricists, called ‘ideas’ (for this notion, the Germans reserved the term ‘Vorstellung’, usually translated as ‘representation’). Rather, the ‘Ideen’ of the German tradition had a distinctly Platonic provenance: such ‘ideas’ (or ‘forms’) had not originally been conceived of as entities within any enclosed mental sphere, not even the mind of some world-creating god—such a conception characterizing only the late antique Platonism that had informed early Christian thought. Moreover, Aristotle in particular was significant for Hegel, 6 and for Aristotle ‘ideas’ had been rendered as the ‘forms’ that primarily informed the matter of corporeal substances. In appealing to the speculative categories of the ancient world against those of the early modern world, neither were the idealists advocating some simple affirmation of ancient philosophy: the break of natural science and other features of modernity with the ordered Aristotelian cosmos had eliminated that as a possibility. As Hegel was to put it: ‘once the substantial form of the spirit has inwardly reconstituted itself, all attempts to preserve the forms of an earlier culture are utterly in vain; like withered leaves they are pushed off by the new buds already growing at their roots’.7 Rather, idealists from Leibniz through to Hegel sought somehow to accommodate or incorporate into a form of broadly Aristotelian speculative thought the distinctly unAristotelian conceptions of 5 Tolstoy, What to Do?, 170–1. 6 

A. Ferrarin, Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7  G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 26.

Hegel (1770–1831)   49 modern life, together with the distinctive role given to individual ‘subjectivity’ within it. Thus German ‘Idealismus’ might be better described in terms of the increasing attempts to locate the phenomena associated with the modern ‘subjective’ conception of consciousness and the emerging ‘mechanical’ worldview within a more encompassing framework that was seen as in some ways continuous with the outlook of both everyday life and Greek speculative thought. For Hegel, in particular, this came to take an historical dimension in which Greek speculative philosophy could be seen as set on a trajectory in which the modern conception of an atomic subject standing opposed to its ‘object’— a conception also linked to the rise of Christianity—was somehow generated from the matrix of ancient thought, bringing about both the freedom and alienation that characterized modern life. For Hegel, the task facing moderns was that of somehow bringing about a reconciliation of the alienated modern subject with the world without sacrificing its unique form of freedom.

3.2  The Method of a ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ and the Role of ‘Consciousness’ in Philosophical Thought Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has since become one of the major works of the western philosophical canon—many readers, especially since the turn of the twentieth century, finding in it a more acceptable philosophy than that contained in Hegel’s systematic works. But that is not how Hegel or his contemporaries saw its significance. The term ‘phenomenology’ predated Hegel, having been coined by the eighteenthcentury mathematician J.H. Lambert, and having been used by Kant, in a letter to Lambert, to suggest a type of methodological ‘propaedeutic’ to the actual doing of scientific philosophy. With this Kant seems to have meant by ‘phenomenology’ what he later characterized as ‘critique’ in the Critique of Pure Reason—a work which Kant regarded as enabling further properly scientific approaches to both theoretical and practical philosophy. Such a sense of a propaedeutic to philosophy was central to Hegel’s use of the term, and while we find in the Phenomenology many philosophical ideas that are clearly Hegel’s own and that recur in other works, the text itself was not meant to be an expression of philosophical thought, but a type of intellectual activity in which ordinary ‘consciousness’ is to be led to a position from which it can start to think philosophically. According to the text’s original title, Hegel had conceived of phenomenology as a ‘science of the experience of consciousness’, but the ‘experience’ involved here is meant to lead to the abandonment of the position of ‘consciousness’ itself. Genuine philosophizing, then, would start in earnest with the Science of Logic, and would be continued in the system of ‘real philosophy’ that would be constructed on the basis of the ‘thought determinations’ worked out in the Science of Logic. But what can be meant by the idea of thought going beyond the structures of ‘consciousness’ in this way?

50   Paul Redding

3.2.1 Consciousness With the idea of the need to surpass ‘consciousness’, Hegel was in no way suggesting that philosophical thought should be unconscious: ‘the distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free one’, he notes, is that ‘the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done . . . spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality’.8 Hegel’s thoughts on ‘consciousness’ are subtle. First, he was not tied to the Cartesian identification of thinking and consciousness, and even seemed to recognize a place for unconscious mental processes.9 Nevertheless, he held that for free thought the thinker has to rise to a consciousness of those determinations that structure thought—determinations of which one would not normally be conscious. Rather, the sense in which he denies that consciousness is the appropriate cognitive medium for philosophy is the sense in which consciousness is conceived in terms of a fundamental and fixed separation and opposition between the individual thinker (the ‘subject’) and that which is being thought (the ‘object’ of which that subject is conscious)—a structure that had been elaborated by Reinhold. While this oppositional ‘subject–object’ structure does characterize an essential phase of thinking for Hegel, it cannot be taken to be the defining characteristic or the essential nature of thought. With this in mind, some of Hegel’s motives for denying that consciousness can be the medium of philosophy become apparent. For example, philosophy could never aspire to the comprehensiveness proper to it (there being nothing beyond the proper scope of philosophy; its subject matter is ‘the Absolute’) were its subject matter construed as an object for a subject. Clearly then there would be something excluded: the very subject doing the thinking. While what Hegel had in mind as an alternative to this intuitively plausible subject–object model of thought is not immediately obvious, a few possible candidates suggest themselves. He might be appealing to philosophy on the model of a type of self-knowledge, in which the subject-over-against-an-object conception seems wrong as subject and object are here identical, or he might be thinking of a type of collective thinking, undertaken by a community, say, in which the unity of the ‘thinking subject’ is distributed over a plurality of different subjects, or he could have in mind something closer to a religious conception of some sort of ‘participation’ of the individual conscious subject in the mind of a god. All of these elements play a role in Hegel’s alternative to the simple subject–object model, but to select out one image in preference to the others gives a distorted impression as Hegel attempts to integrate these three dimensions into a uniquely structured single account.

3.2.2  Following the ‘Experience’ of Consciousness Hegel’s Phenomenology commences with a consideration of variously articulated structures (or ‘shapes’) of consciousness. Everyday subjects, Hegel thinks, in the first instance tend to understand themselves as individual conscious subjects who experience and know particular kinds of objects. The experience involved in reading the text will co-opt such subjects (the readers) for philosophical thought by getting them to divest themselves of 8 Hegel, Science of Logic, 37.

9 Hegel, Science of Logic, 39.

Hegel (1770–1831)   51 the idea that the oppositional structure of consciousness is ultimate. But phenomenology does this not by offering arguments to persuade the reader to somehow relinquish their self-conception (this is one sense in which phenomenology is not philosophy proper). Rather, it simply appeals to the experience of following the consequences for a represented consciousness (the ‘object consciousness’) of that consciousness’s attempting to take seriously the normative shape within which it functions. It will be within and on account of this experience that the limitations of each shape of consciousness become apparent, thus forcing the object consciousness to move on to another shape. At the end of the process, the readers having themselves experienced the limitations of all particular shapes of consciousness now come to abandon the overarching subject–object opposition of consciousness itself, thereby becoming freed for thought proper, and hence for philosophy. While Hegel’s interpretation of ‘phenomenology’ is a highly innovative one, we might think of the basic conception behind his idea as a Kantian one. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had argued that since empirical knowledge is conditioned by structures contributed by the knower (both intuitional and conceptual), the ‘objects’ thereby known cannot be thought of ‘realistically’ as what makes up the world as it is ‘in itself’. In the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ Kant argued that this confusion of objects (in his jargon, confusing ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’) characteristically results in the generation of contradictions such as those that have traditionally plagued metaphysics. For this reason, he implied, we must refrain from the attempt to know the world ‘as it is in itself’. This project of traditional metaphysics was then to be replaced by a type of self-knowledge—knowledge by the thinker of its own constitutive conditions as a thinker. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, each of the steps within the experience that consciousness goes through will present micro-instances of the generation of the contradictions Kant had alluded to, but the contradictions are afforded resolutions that Kant would not have recognized. Thus in the ‘sense-certainty’ examined in ­chapter 1, this shape of consciousness takes as its true objects bare sensuous presences, somewhat like the ‘ideas’ that early modern empiricists thought could be known with certainty. We readers then follow the attempts of the subject of this shape of consciousness to make these initially implicit criteria defining its objects explicit—that is, consciously available to it. By the end of the chapter, however, we have seen that this consciousness has learnt from experience that its own initial conception of objecthood was contradictory. Rather than being immediate and singular as assumed—something immediately present like this, here, now10—its objects have been experienced as having some implicit universal (conceptual) aspect. To be consciously aware of what is present to the mind as this is now to be aware of it as an instance of a kind—it is now a this. A new criterion concerning the nature of the object known emerges from this realization that makes this conceptual dimension explicit—one that defines the new ‘shape’ of ‘perception’, the experience of which is in turn observed in ­chapter 2. Already a pattern for the ‘experience of consciousness’ has been established. As in ­chapter  1, consciousness’s efforts to make its implicit criteria for objecthood explicit to itself, by making them, in turn, objects of consciousness, has resulted in contradictions. The objects of ‘perception’ are basically conceived as something like Aristotelian instances

10  G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§91–5.

52   Paul Redding of thing-kinds, but once more, experience finds that contradictions undermine this shape, and a new shape, ‘the understanding’, emerges from the rubble of perception. The understanding takes as real not those immediately graspable thing-kind instances of ‘perception’, but something underlying the perceived phenomena and responsible for them— posited (rather than perceived) ‘forces’.11 Of course ‘the understanding’ will survive its own experience no more than the earlier shapes, but what emerges from its collapse marks a higher-level transition than those seen so far—the transition to ­chapter 4, ‘The Truth of Self-Certainty’, marking a transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. What we see here is something like a transition from all pre-Kantian conceptions of the objects of philosophy to a Kantian one, or, more specifically, to the form of transformed Kantianism found in the work of Fichte. And in this context we find what is perhaps the most well-known part of the Phenomenology, the ‘struggle of recognition’ of the ‘master–slave dialectic’—a parable meant to reveal the necessity of normative, institutionalizable recognitive relations between individual subjects for the functioning of any form of ‘self-consciousness’. Self-consciousness as ‘self-certainty’ initially conceives itself in a negating relation to the object of which it is conscious, as in the intentional state of desire, but experience shows that it ‘achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’.12 We readers are meant to grasp this relation of two mutually recognizing self-consciousnesses as an instantiation of spirit (Geist)—‘an absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousness which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence’.13 But this essentially mutual relation constitutive of spirit is here contradicted by the asymmetry of its instantiation between master and slave.14 A slave ‘does not count as an “I”, for his master is his “I” instead’,15 and this contradiction will become apparent to the protagonists in the experience of the condition of slavery in which the independence of the master turns into dependence on the slave. The ‘dialectic’ characterizing these ‘experiences’ through which the reader will progress will eventually be seen within historical configurations of such relations of recognition constituting ‘objective spirit’. Clearly, there is a type of telos envisaged here aimed at a configuration of institutions capable of supporting the type of subjectivity that will itself be capable of truly ‘free’ thought and action, and thus capable of philosophizing. Thus, after tracing the experience of self-consciousness through the more encompassing processes of ‘reason’ (in ­chapter 5) and configurations of ‘objective spirit’ (in ­chapter 6), in the hastily sketched final two chapters of the Phenomenology, ­chapters 7, ‘Religion’, and 8, ‘Absolute Knowing’, Hegel moves to the level of what he calls ‘absolute spirit’, where rather than configurations of actual patterns of intersubjectivity (objective spirit), he focuses on the cultural objectifications of art, religion, and philosophy as they develop through history. While this termination in ‘absolute knowing’ is often taken as testifying to Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s critical project and his commitment to a substantial ‘monistic’ 11 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §136. 13 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §177. 15 

12 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §175.

14 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§184–5.

G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §163, Add.

Hegel (1770–1831)   53 metaphysics,16 some interpreters have tended to see Hegel as furthering the Kantian critique of ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics. Thus rather than understand ‘absolute knowing’ as the achievement of some ultimate and substantive ‘God’s-eye view’ of everything—the philosophical analogue to the fusion with God sought in some religions—‘post-Kantian’ interpreters17 see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought in which the thinker becomes consciously aware of its own thought processes. This is the standpoint at which the reader of Hegel’s next book, the Science of Logic, is now meant to be situated. Philosophy proper starts here, although many of the ideas encountered will have been already seen in the Phenomenology.

3.3  Logic as the Standpoint of Philosophy It is common to start a discussion of Hegel’s ‘logic’ by pointing out that by ‘logic’ we cannot assume that Hegel means what the term means in contemporary philosophy. Hegel did not have in mind that type of formal approach to valid inference that we now think of as the subject matter of logic. Rather, in contrast to any formal consideration of the processes of thought, Hegel says that logic ‘constitutes metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy’.18 Thus many have taken Hegel’s logic to be primarily an account of the constitutive structures of ‘being’.19 Nevertheless, such claims that Hegel’s logic is ‘really’ a metaphysics can obscure both the degree to which it remains a ‘logic’ and the peculiarities of the type of ‘metaphysics’ that such a logic is meant to constitute.20 Hegel certainly resisted any attempt to reduce logic to what he described as a ‘logic of the understanding’, but nevertheless insisted that ‘the mere logic of the understanding is contained in the speculative logic’21 and considered the understanding as ‘the first form of logical thinking’.22 It was an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self-conscious intuition, figurate conception, and in our . . . ideational desiring and willing . . . and that these universalities have been brought into prominence for their own sake and made objects of contemplation as was done by Plato and after him especially by Aristotle.23

16 

R.-P. Horstmann, ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an Argument for a Monistic Ontology’, Inquiry 1, no. 49 (2006), 103–18. 17  For example, R.B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Pinkard, Hegel; Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism. 18 Hegel, Science of Logic, 27. 19  F. Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005); S. Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006); R. Stern, Hegelian Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 20  For a welcome corrective to the traditional view, see J.W. Burbidge, ‘Conceiving’, in A Companion to Hegel, ed. S. Houlgate and M. Baur (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 159–74. 21 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, § 82, Add. 22 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §80, Add. 23 Hegel, Science of Logic, 33.

54   Paul Redding It is the ‘right’ and ‘merit’ of the understanding that it gives ‘fixity’ and ‘determinacy’ to the domains of theoretical and practical reasoning24 since in philosophy ‘each thought should be grasped in its full precision and . . . nothing should remain vague and indeterminate’.25 For Hegel, the restriction of logic to the fixed determinations in the ‘logic of the understanding’ is problematic, not because he embraced any ‘irrationalist’ conception of a world-process fundamentally outside the scope of conceptual capture. Rather, he is critical of the ‘logic of the understanding’ because it leaves out the two other essential moments of rational thinking: the negativity of ‘dialectic’, which, as we have seen, brings the fixed determinations of the understanding into contradiction,26 and the positivity of ‘speculation’, which ‘apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and in their transition’.27 It is only these three interconnected dimensions of ‘logic’ that give life to thought. Despite Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s restrictedness to the understanding, we can still recognize in Hegel’s approach to the categories or ‘thought determinations’ elements of Kant’s ‘metaphysical deduction’ of the categories in the ‘Transcendental analytic, Book 1, Chapter I’ of the Critique of Pure Reason. For Hegel, Kant’s deduction of the categories had relied upon a taxonomy of judgment forms that he had simply accepted from the tradition and not deduced, thus allowing an external determination into a process that should have been one of immanent development. Hegel’s positive use of a dialectic that for Kant had only negative connotations supplies him, he thinks, with the means for expounding this rational development. Thus in the first chapter of Book 1, ‘Being’, we see how developments in the Science of Logic in many ways repeat those of the first chapters of the Phenomenology—now, however, at the level of the determinations of ‘thought’ itself, rather than within the oppositional structure of ‘consciousness’. ‘Being’ is the thought determination with which the work commences because it at first seems to be the most obvious and ‘immediate’: what everything has in common is that it is. ‘Being’ seems to have no presuppositions, but the effort of thought to make such a content determinate as a content for conscious awareness ultimately undermines it and brings about some new content. ‘Being’ seems to be both immediate and simple, but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only determinate by standing in opposition to something else—‘nothing’. In fact, the attempt to think ‘being’ as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept ‘nothing’, has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that being has effectively become nothing. The way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, ‘becoming’—the concept that ‘apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition’. We now grasp that ‘being’ was not a self-sufficient concept as it had seemed, but a ‘moment’ of another more inclusive determination that is now affirmed. The thought determinations of Book 1 lead eventually into those of Book 2, ‘The Doctrine of Essence’. Crucially, the contrasting pair ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ allow the thought of some underlying reality which manifests itself through a different overlying appearance— we are reminded of those ‘forces’ with which ‘the understanding’ in the Phenomenology had been concerned. But distinctions such as ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ will themselves 24 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §126.

25 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §81, Add. For the philosophical background to this dimension of reason as Hegel conceives it, see M.N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 27 Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §82. 26 

Hegel (1770–1831)   55 instantiate the relation of determinate negation, and the metaphysical tendency to think of reality as made up of some underlying substrates or forces in contrast to the merely superficial appearance will itself come to grief with the discovery that the notion of an ‘essence’ is only meaningful in relation to the ‘appearance’ that it is meant to explain away. Hegel is critical of Kant for presupposing an array of judgment forms when deducing the categories, but nevertheless, like Kant, he links these categorial structures to the structures of judgments and inferences they inform. But these must be deduced rather than assumed, and he attempts to do so in the course of Book 3, ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’, this ‘book’ also comprising ‘Volume Two’ of the work, the system of ‘Subjective Logic’. The account of ‘the concept’ with which Book 3 commences is ‘in the first instance, formal’ and it is here, in c­ hapters 2 (‘The Judgment’) and 3 (‘The Syllogism’) that we find Hegel’s account of formal logic. Clearly Hegel doesn’t mean by ‘concept’ (Begriff, sometimes translated as ‘notion’) what Kant standardly meant—the type of empirical conceptual representation applied in a judgment. Rather, Hegel’s model for ‘concept’ is the ‘transcendental’ concept or ‘idea’ that Kant thought of as ultimately presupposed by the application of any empirical concept—the concept ‘I’.28 We have mentioned Hegel’s innovative recognitive account of the conditions of self-conscious ‘I-hood’ in the Phenomenology, and, to be determinate, such recognitive acts must employ concepts in the way implied by the fact that a slave, for example, recognizes his or her master as a master, and in this affirms his or her own status as a slave. Hegel had made the ‘I’ one such concept, but the ‘I’ is not universal to human life, as Kant thought; rather, it emerges with developments of ‘spirit’ only found in history after the decline of the Greek polis. Possession of the concept ‘I’ will thereby be dependent on the possession of many other concepts, including ones with which an individual will recognize others and recognize the worldly things which mediate relation to others. Thus ‘I’ will be no self-sufficient atomic concept; it must ultimately be conceptually related to many other concepts, and Hegel purports to unpack this implicit content via an examination of the way concepts function in judgments and syllogisms. This will lead to the puzzling idea that the formal syllogism will generate a content from its own processes and thus give itself objective reality. This is one point on which disagreements as to the sense in which ‘logic’ constitutes a metaphysics will turn. The concept, Hegel asserts, ‘contains three moments:  universality, particularity and singularity (Einzelheit)’29 and these three categories will form the master categories structuring the rest of the exposition. Kant had contrasted the generality of concepts with the ‘singularity’ (Einzelheit) of the intuitive contents needed to make concepts determinate. Hegel also recognizes that merely universal concepts are indeterminate and must become determinate in order to function at all, but rather than indicating the need for the addition of something non-conceptual, he appeals to a different ‘moment’ of conceptuality—particularity. Hegel uses ‘particularity’ (Besonderheit) with the sense it had for the Greeks: a ‘particular’ is to be grasped in terms of the genus-concept specifying the kind instantiated, and is to be distinguished from something singular (Einzelnes)—commonly called a ‘bare particular’. We have in fact seen these crucial distinctions before, in Hegel’s critique of ‘sense-certainty’ in the Phenomenology. What sense-certainty had immediately grasped as singular turned out to be a concept-containing particular—a thing-kind instance. These

28 Hegel, Science of Logic, 583–4.

29 Hegel, Science of Logic, 600.

56   Paul Redding distinctions will be crucial for Hegel’s account of judgments and inferences, which are taxonomized according to the different ways the concepts constituting them function as universals, particulars, or singulars. When Hegel comes to discuss judgments in ­chapter 2 he contrasts two different approaches to the logical structure of judgment that might be taken: a term-first approach in which subject and predicate are ‘considered complete, each on its own account, apart from the other’,30 and an approach in which subject and predicate terms receive their determination ‘in the judgment first’.31 The former clearly reflects the approach of traditional term logics like that of Aristotle, while the latter seems to allude to the approach in which the components of the judgment are treated in terms of their contribution to what is usually thought of as their propositional content, such as in Stoic logic with which Hegel was familiar.32 The significance of these differences comes out clearly in Hegel’s treatment of inferences (‘syllogisms’) in c­ hapter 3, but it also reflects on the differences in the structures of the doctrines of being and essence, as the negations found in being reflect the term negations of term logic, while those of essence reflect the external negations of propositional logics. Hegel describes the syllogism as ‘the truth of the judgment’,33 a claim that might be read in terms of an ‘inferentialist’ account of judgment content.34 At a ‘formal’ level Hegel shows unexpected sophistication here, as what he has in mind with such a ‘proposition-first’ approach becomes explicit in his discussion of the ‘mathematical syllogism’—an approach to judgment introduced by Leibniz and developed by the Tübingen logician whose influence was felt during Hegel’s time there, Gottfried Ploucquet.35 Rather than, like Aristotle, thinking of the judgment as the joining of a universal-naming predicate to a substance-naming particular subject, Leibniz suggested treating the subject term as itself a predicate, such that ‘S is P’ could be read as identifying terms ‘S’ and ‘P’ in that both could be regarded as being predicated of some (singular) ‘third’ not named in the judgment.36 Treating this relation between subject and predicate as a type of identity—‘S = P’—allowed their mathematical representation. This transformation resulted in the traditional syllogistic being completely reconfigured into what Hegel describes as the ‘syllogism of reflection’, which becomes made up on singular judgments, which allow inductive inferences. This change in attitude to judgments and syllogisms reflects deep metaphysical differences between ancient and modern thought. Thus, while the objects that the Aristotelian categorical judgments making up the ‘syllogisms of existence’ are about will be instances 30 Hegel, Science of Logic, 625.

31 Hegel, Science of Logic, 627; and Burbidge, ‘Conceiving’, 165. 32 

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 volumes, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), volume II, 255; and P. Redding, ‘Hegel, Aristotle and the Conception of Free Agency’, in Freiheit: Stuttgarter Hegelkongress 2011, ed. Gunnar Hindrichs and Axel Honneth (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2013), 389–404. 33 Hegel, Science of Logic, 669. 34  R. B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); P. Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 35 Hegel, Science of Logic, 679–86. 36  M. Capozzi and G. Roncaglia, ‘Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant’, in The Development of Modern Logic, ed. Leila Haaparanta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 94–5.

Hegel (1770–1831)   57 of thing-kinds to which contingent properties are predicated, this characterization will not hold for the objects of the constituent judgments of ‘syllogisms of reflection’. They are no longer perceivable substances but the abstract ‘posits’ of the understanding. It is clear that for Hegel, Leibniz’s logic, which he treats at the point of transition between these two syllogistic forms,37 actualizes the dialectical self-undermining potential that is implicit in Aristotle’s whole logical project. Leibniz is today championed as the instigator of the type of algebraicization of logic reinvented in the nineteenth century by Boole and others, as well as the type of mechanization of thought that blossomed in the second half of the twentieth century. Hegel treats Leibniz and Ploucquet more as representing the point of dialectical collapse of the traditional syllogistic, but his reasons here are similar to those championing such approaches today. In the judgments of the mathematical syllogism all distinctions between the ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ moments have been levelled as all concepts have been reduced to bare universal predicates applying to singular terms,38 but this undermines the intuitable (diagrammable) relations upon which Aristotelian inferential relations had initially been understood. Logical relations are now just a matter of ‘combinations and permutations’ among symbols and so can be conceived as carried out mechanically—that is, independently of consciousness.39 For Hegel, of course, loss of consciousness represents the death of what is essential for spirit and thought. That something living—here reason—has to be brought to the point of its death before a proper resolution of the underlying problem is apparent is a recurring theme in Hegel from the Phenomenology’s ‘struggle for recognition’ onwards. Thus, Henry Harris has argued for the importance for Hegel of the example of the pseudo-science of phrenology, where ‘observing reason’ has been forced to the absurd identification of spirit with ‘a bone’.40 Harris’s description of phrenology as ‘the Calvary where singular Reason is crucified, and the spirit of “absolute knowledge” rises from the grave’41 reminds us of the significance of God’s very death in Hegel’s understanding of Christianity. Similarly, Leibniz’s logic represents the ‘ossification’ of thought 42 as it reduces the life of thought to the operations of a dead mechanism—here too, thought must somehow ‘rise from the grave’. Clearly something of the Aristotelian speculative philosophy in which thought and existence were not abstractly opposed is called for, but equally clearly the solution must somehow incorporate the new rather than be a simple return to the old, as the negation of the old was already entailed by it.43 The reflective syllogism has provided a new type of inference for a distinctively modern conception of inductive reasoning which attempts to produce generalities from arrays of single instances, but Hegel points out that such reasoning must rely on analogies between individual things, such as when one reasons by analogy, hypothetically inferring properties 37 Hegel, Science of Logic, 679–86.

38 Hegel, Science of Logic, 679–80. By this calculus, logic is meant to be ‘mechanically brought within the reach of the uneducated (Ungebildeten)’ (Hegel, Science of Logic, 686)—that is, those whose thinking has not be brought to the standpoint of philosophy. 40 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §343. 41  H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 585. 42 Hegel, Science of Logic, 575. 43  The centrality of ‘mechanism’ to Hegel’s account of spirit in the socio-political sphere has recently been underlined by N. Ross, On Mechanism in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2008). 39 

58   Paul Redding of some thing on the basis of its similarity to another. One might understand the moon as an earth (each orbits another body), and infer (fallibly) by analogy possible properties of the moon. Like the Phenomenology’s ‘this’ that is also an instance of ‘a this’, here the earth is both a single thing and an instance of a kind. As such it plays the role of a model for the task of understanding other bodies, but it plays this role only because it has been given it by a reasoner in a process of reasoning with it. Here relations between universals and particulars hold in as much as they are posited by a subject—the ‘I’ from which the determinations of the ‘Subjective Logic’ had started. The inherence of universals within particulars is not simply to be presupposed as in the objective logic, and Aristotelian realism about logical form has given place to a version of Kantian idealism about form. But this Kantian form of idealism must be stripped of the ‘formal’ concept of its presupposed ‘transcendental I’. The ‘I’ must be shown to be itself the product of an objective, historically developed, form of life. Hegel thus describes these processes which we have seen in the ‘ossified’ material of formal logic as ‘pregnant’ with content 44—a content within which can be actualized the hitherto presupposed transcendental ‘I’ itself.

3.3.1  The Return to the Objectivity of Logic and the Transition to ‘Real-Philosophy’ The ‘Subjective Logic’ commenced with the discussion of ‘Subjectivity’ within which Hegel had sketched his historical account of the development of formal logic from Aristotle to Leibniz, but formal logic only presents the ossified material of thought, and so ‘the problem is to render this material fluid and to re-kindle the spontaneity of the Notion in such dead matter’.45 In the next section, ‘Objectivity’, logic regains the sort of objectivity that it had for the ancients before the separation of being and thought, but this objectivity must now accommodate a place for the ‘I’ which has been revealed as an essential component of the logical process. We now have to think of ‘judgments’ and ‘syllogisms’ not simply as subjective acts, but as processes running through the world such that elements of the world can be understood as configurations of thought’s articulation. This sounds like the ancient doctrine of ‘noûs’ or ‘logos’ permeating reality, but this can no longer be thought of independently of the presence of finite beings such as ourselves, through whose activities such processes unfold. And such beings have to be capable of the type of objectivity of thought that allows conceptual life to permeate nature. In this sense, Hegel’s treatment of ‘Objectivity’ in Section Two of Book 3 and, following this, in Section Three, ‘The Idea’, must be read as attempting to exhibit the ‘content’ able to function as objective conditions for this very type of thought. What we find in ‘Objectivity’, then, is Hegel’s attempt to provide the logical structure of a series of forms of increasingly complex thought, starting with thought about mechanical processes and leading through thought about more complex processes such as chemical ones, and finally to the thought of organisms. This will provide the logical infrastructure of what in the following ‘Real-Philosophy’ will be his Philosophy of Nature. Then, in 44 Hegel, Science of Logic, 695.

45 Hegel, Science of Logic, 575.

Hegel (1770–1831)   59 Section Three, ‘The Idea’, he will attempt to sketch the logical structure to be realized in the Philosophy of Spirit.

3.4  Hegel’s Systematic Real-Philosophy 3.4.1  Philosophy of Nature Like the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia is itself divided into three parts:  Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. Hegel’s philosophy of nature, tied as it is to a presentation of the state of the natural sciences in his time, is generally thought to have little more than historical interest; it is clearly the philosophy of spirit that has been the focus of most subsequent attention, and it is expansions on sections of the philosophy of spirit that form major texts within Hegel’s oeuvre. We cannot pass over the philosophy of nature, however, before addressing one common objection: the objection that Hegel attempts to ‘deduce’ the entirety of the natural world from logical considerations alone, and so pre-empt empirical science. This objection is summed up in a critique of Schelling’s early idealism made by the philosopher W. T. Krug in 1801. Hegel had responded in the following year and would return to his defence even after his break with Schelling. Krug had asserted that such an idealism must deduce, from the idea of ‘the Absolute’ alone, all contingent phenomena, including the actual pen with which he was writing his very critique. Krug’s criticism, Hegel responded, was made not from the point of view of philosophy but from ‘the common understanding’ that ‘posits the Absolute on exactly the same level with the finite, and extends the range of the requirements that are made in respect of the finite to the Absolute’.46 Krug did not understand ‘that the determinacies which cannot be comprehended within transcendental idealism, belong—so far as they are a proper topic of philosophical discussion at all—as Mr. Krug’s pen is not—to the philosophy of nature’.47 Hegel was to make a similar point in a remark added to the Philosophy of Nature:  It is the height of pointlessness to demand of the concept that it should explain, and as it is said, construe or deduce these contingent products of nature . . . Traces of conceptual determination will certainly survive in the most particularized product, although they will not exhaust its nature.48

Rather than ‘deducing’ the entire content of empirical reality, philosophy of nature takes as its subject matter the results of the natural sciences and tries to find within these results the sorts of categorial structures deduced in the logic. Hegel’s rejection 46  G. W. F. Hegel, ‘How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug)’, in George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 299. 47  Hegel, ‘How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug)’, 299. 48  G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: 3 volumes, trans. and ed. M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), §250, Remark.

60   Paul Redding of Kant’s intuition–concept dichotomy was not meant to imply that there is no place for the contingencies of the actual world that Kant had tied to the contribution of intuition.

3.4.2  Philosophy of Spirit Hegel’s usual triadic pattern in the Philosophy of Spirit results in the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. The first of these constitutes what is closest in Hegel’s philosophy to a ‘philosophy of mind’ in the contemporary sense, while the philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which ‘spirit’ is objectified in patterns of human life. The last comprises his philosophies of art, religion, and philosophy itself. Other than the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right, the bulk of Hegel’s mature written legacy consists in reconstructions of various series of lectures given at the University of Berlin. These lectures had been reconstituted (sometimes, unreliably) on the basis of Hegel’s own notes and various surviving student transcriptions. Of these series, one on philosophy of history coincides with the final sections of the Encyclopedia section on ‘Objective Spirit’, while the philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy coincide with the contents of ‘Absolute Spirit’.

3.4.3  Subjective Spirit From what we have seen of Hegel’s discussion of the polar oppositions of consciousness in the Phenomenology, as well as the fact that the Philosophy of Nature concludes in a consideration of the animal organism, we can confidently expect that the starting point for Hegel’s approach to the mind will be something closer to Aristotle’s conception of the soul than the modern conception of ‘consciousness’. Thus in ‘Anthropology’ Hegel is concerned with what he terms ‘Seele’, ‘soul’—which seems to translate more the ancient Greek term ‘psyche’: ‘If soul and body are absolutely opposed to one another as is maintained by the abstractive intellectual consciousness’, Hegel comments, ‘then there is no possibility of any community between them. The community was, however, recognized by ancient metaphysics as an undeniable fact’.49 Here spirit is ‘sunk’ in nature, and consciousness is limited to what now might be described as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ alone—‘the feeling soul’. Consciousness in the sense of the modern subject–object opposition only makes its appearance in the following second section labelled ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (which, reprising much of the earlier book of that name, raises a problem for how we are to understand the relation of ‘phenomenology’ and actual philosophy). ‘Subjective Spirit’ concludes with ‘Psychology’ which treats the expressly rational dimensions of the life of the mind, considered in terms that would now be described as ‘normative’ rather than naturalistic. This means that subjective spirit will ultimately only be understood in the context of objective spirit.

49 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §389, Add.

Hegel (1770–1831)   61

3.4.4  Objective Spirit Philosophy of objective spirit concerns the objective patterns of social interaction and the cultural institutions within which ‘spirit’ is objectified in history, and here we are in the realm of ‘normative’ and ‘institutional’ facts rather than ‘brute’ ones. Objective spirit starts from the conception of a single agent who grasps itself as the bearer of ‘abstract right’, but not from any commitment to the ontological primacy of individuals. Just as the initial simple categories of the Science of Logic develop in a way meant to demonstrate that what had at the start been conceived as simple can in fact only be made determinate in virtue of being part of some larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and ultimately historical, structure or process. As is explicit in the expanded section of Philosophy of Right, contractual exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is treated as a form of recognition50—the approach introduced in c­ hapter 4 of the Phenomenology. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, is thereby recognizing that other as a proprietor of that thing, or, more properly, of its value. By contrast, such proprietorship would be denied rather than recognized in fraud or theft—forms of ‘wrong’ (Unrecht) in which right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited. In the exchange relation we can see what it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a ‘common will’—an idea which will have important implications with respect to the difference of Hegel’s conception of the state from that of Rousseau. Hegel passes from the abstract individualism of ‘Abstract Right’ to the social determinacies of ‘Sittlichkeit’ or ‘Ethical Life’ via considerations first of ‘wrong’ (the negation of right) and its punishment (the negation of wrong, and hence the ‘negation of the negation’ of the original right), and then of ‘morality’, conceived more or less as an internalization of the external legal relations. The corresponding paragraphs on morality Philosophy of Right (§§129–41) contain passages well-known in the context of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s morality of the categorical imperative. Just as Hegel had accused Kant’s deduction of the categories of relying on ‘external’ considerations, here Hegel argues that the doctrine of the categorical imperative is unable to account for actual concrete duties and must presuppose them. Kant’s account of morality can only be understood against the background of concrete normative forms of life: Sittlichkeit within which the modern reflective moral subject will play a real but limited role. One of the distinctive features of modern Sittlichkeit is the way in which it distinguishes the sphere of ‘civil society’ from that of the state proper, situating this economically based sphere as dependent upon and in contrastive opposition to the more immediate sphere of the family. While civil society is structured by the abstract recognitive forms we have seen in contract, the family is a form of sociality mediated by a quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and feeling. In the family the particularity of each individual tends to be absorbed into the particular social unit, giving this manifestation of 50  G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §71. Remark.

62   Paul Redding Sittlichkeit a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in the first instance as separate singular individuals who then enter into relationships that are external to them. These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of the modern state are articulated and understood. Part of the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of these two principles mediates the other, each thereby mitigating the one-sidedness of the other. All these spheres are meant as modelled on different ‘syllogistic’ configurations from the logic, and we might see Hegel’s ‘logical’ schematization of the modern ‘rational’ state as a way of displaying the structure of just those sorts of institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer Rousseau’s question of the form of association needed for the formation and expression of the ‘general will’. Perhaps one of the most influential parts of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right concerns the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy reflecting the unmediated operations of civil society. While it is true that ‘subjective selfishness’ turns into a ‘contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else’,51 this does not entail that this ‘general plenty’ would thereby trickle down through the rest of society for the benefit of all. In fact, the unfettered operation of the market produces a class caught in a spiral of poverty. Starting from this ‘dialectical’ analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of Hegel’s ‘civil society’ and socialize the means of production, but Hegel had not drawn this conclusion. The distortions of the economy were to be contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state, and its social effects offset by welfarist state intervention. The final five paragraphs of this section on objective spirit—and hence the point of transition to absolute spirit—concern world history (die Weltgeschichte). We have seen the relevance of historical issues for Hegel in the context of the Phenomenology, such that a series of different forms of objective spirit can be grasped in terms of the degree to which they enable the development of a universalizable self-consciousness capable of rationality and freedom. Hegel was to expand on these ideas in a lecture series given five times during his Berlin period, and it was via the text assembled on the basis of these lectures by his son Karl that many readers would be introduced to Hegel’s ideas after his death. World history is made up of the histories of particular peoples within which spirit assumes some ‘particular principle on the lines of which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its actuality’.52 Just the same dialectic that we have first seen operative within shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology is to be observed here. An historical community acts on the principle that informs its social life, the experience of this action bringing about a conscious awareness of this principle, breaking the immediacy of its operation. This brings about the decline of that community but gives rise to the principle of a new community:  in rendering itself objective and making this its being an object of thought, [spirit] on the one hand destroys the determinate form of its being, and on the other hand gains a

51 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §199.

52  G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’ (1830), trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §548.

Hegel (1770–1831)   63 comprehension of the universal element which it involves, and thereby gives a new form to its inherent principle . . . [which] has risen into another, and in fact a higher principle.53

This dialectic, which, however, only passes through some communities, is ‘the path of liberation for the spiritual substance, the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is realized in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness and self-consciousness’.54 ‘The analysis of the successive grades [of universal history] in their abstract form belongs to logic’,55 but once more, it must be stressed that, as with philosophy of nature, philosophy of history is not meant to somehow deduce actual empirical historical phenomena like Krug’s pen; rather, it takes the results of actual empirical history as its material and attempts to find exemplified within this material the sorts of categorial progressions of the logic.56 The actual is full of contingencies from which empirical historians will have already abstracted in constructing their narratives, for example, when writing from particular national perspectives. To grasp history philosophically, however, will be to grasp it from the stance of world history itself, and this provides the transition to absolute spirit, as world history will be understood in terms of the manifestation of what from a religious perspective is called ‘God’, or from a philosophical perspective, ‘reason’. Hegel clearly thinks that there is a method of cognitively relating to history in a way that goes beyond the standpoint of ‘consciousness’ and the understanding—the standpoint of what we now think of as informing scientific history. From the perspective of consciousness history is something that stands over against me qua something known, but from the standpoint of self-consciousness I grasp this history as the history of that which contributes to me, qua free and rational being.

3.4.5  Absolute Spirit The subject matter of the final 25 paragraphs of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, ‘Absolute Spirit’, came to be expanded massively into the contents of three different lecture series on philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and history of philosophy that were to appear after Hegel’s death, and with which Hegel was to become perhaps the most significant synoptic theorist of these cultural phenomena. As any attempt to capture the richness of his thought here in a few paragraphs would be futile, I will simply sketch how his approach draws on the conceptual resources noted so far. For Kant, aesthetic experience had been conceived largely in relation to the experience of the beauty of nature, but for Hegel aesthetics is primarily about art, and the art of historical peoples is understood in terms of the attempt to bring before consciousness the totality of what is: it is as art that ‘consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape’.57 In the

53 

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 78. 55 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 56. 56  The way in which the activity of the philosophical historian presupposes that of ‘original’ and ‘reflective’ historians is treated in G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet, intro. D. Forbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1–8. 57 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §556. 54 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §549.

64   Paul Redding 1790s, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel had historicized aesthetics, distinguishing the forms of ancient and modern art, and Hegel adopts Schlegel’s terminology to distinguish the ‘classical’ art that thrived in the Greek and Roman worlds from the ‘romantic’ art of post-classical times. Again, the romantic or modern here will be characterized by the depth of a form of subjective consciousness that is largely missing in antiquity. But those in antiquity had lived with a comfortable felt unity between spirit and body, and so modern subjectivity is purchased at the expense of a sense of alienation from the actual world. Hegel, influenced by the work of a former colleague, the Heidelberg philologist Friedrich Creuzer,58 adds to this categorization of art forms a further one characterizing the material cultures of ancient Eastern civilizations such as Persia, India, and Egypt: ‘symbolic’ art. The symbolic art of pantheistic religions of the East used natural elements to symbolize the gods of such cultures: Zoroastrianism had taken light, for example, to symbolize the divine,59 and animal worship was found among the Egyptians.60 But such actual things had to be distinguished from what was meant to be symbolized by them, so violence had to be done to such natural forms in attempts to represent the absolute—such cultural products thus becoming ‘bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless’,61 This, however, undermined their initial function, and a dialectical solution to this contradiction would be found with the art of the Greeks, which gave expression to ‘the Absolute’ or ‘the Idea’ by taking as its material the specifically human form, but only on condition of its being rendered ‘exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world’. But even as idealized in Greek sculpture, say, the represented Greek god is still an object of ‘naïve intuition and sensuous imagination’,62 and as such the classical gods contained the germ of their own decline as they could not evade ‘the finitudes incidental to anthropomorphism [which] pervert the gods into the reverse of what constitutes the essence of the substantial and Divine’.63 A new form of art will be needed to resolve these contradictions: romantic art. But the material for this form will not come from within art itself. Romantic art still represents the Absolute in the form of a man, but now one ‘not merely imagined but factual’. This man is Jesus, understood as the son of God.64 That is, the transition from classical art to the religious art of Christianity also liberates religion from the grip of the sensuous, and Christianity avoids the type of reliance on the beautiful productions of art that characterized classical religions. The switch from classical to romantic art, then, represents a broader movement from a culture whose final authority is an aesthetic one to a culture in which this authority is religious, and thus represents a shift in the authoritativeness of different cognitive forms. While Greek art-religion relied on beautiful sensuous presences to represent the Absolute, the new religious content is fundamentally represented to consciousness as

58  G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975), 310–11. 59 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 325. 60 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 357. 61 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 77. 62 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 77–8. 63 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 502–4. 64 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 505.

Hegel (1770–1831)   65 ‘Vorstellung’—‘representation’. This is a form of representation based in that of everyday perceivable objects and conceives of ‘higher’ things on the metaphorical extension of such cognition. Thus Trinitarian Christian religion still has a (once) perceivable object as the medium for representing its God—Jesus—however, Jesus is not an aesthetically idealized human, but the ‘son of’ another divine person within the triune deity who can only be posited as his ‘father’. After the death of the actual Jesus, God continues to exist in the practices of the religious community qua ‘holy spirit’. Trinitarian Christianity, especially in its modern protestant phase, becomes the ‘consummate religion’, allowing a type of universalization of ‘I-hood’ not found in other religions. Vorstellungen combine sensuous images with conceptualized relations, and a final shift in absolute spirit will occur when this type of thinking is replaced by properly conceptual thought. Hegel sees this as a continuation of the internal transformation within Christianity from medieval Catholicism and modern Protestantism:  It is a great obstinacy, the kind of obstinacy which does honour to human beings, that they are unwilling to acknowledge in their attitudes anything which has not been justified by thought—and this obstinacy is the characteristic property of the modern age, as well as being the distinctive principle of Protestantism. What Luther inaugurated as faith in feeling and the testimony of the spirit is the same thing that the spirit, at a more mature stage of its development, endeavours to grasp in the concept so as to free itself in the present, and thus find itself therein.65

As with the transition from art to religion, the passage from religion to philosophy thus involves a shift within the authority of cognitive forms. Whether Hegel was signalling the overcoming of religion by a fundamentally secular philosophy or a transition to some higher, more rational form of religion is a question that divided his followers into ‘left’ and ‘right’ Hegelians—the split that ultimately brought down Hegelian philosophy itself. One thing is clear: if one takes Hegel as a basically secular modernist, for whom the governance of life in the modern world is to be driven by argumentative, conceptually articulated inquiry rather than appeals to tradition and religion, his account of the nature of ‘logical life’ underlying this modern life will separate him from those more mainstream ‘naturalistic’ forms of secularist modernism. Hegel identified himself as a Christian as he saw the Trinitarian conception of God as a precursor, in the form of Vorstellungen, of his own holistic notion of ‘the concept’. Without this element we have only the dead ossifications of reason, rather than reason itself, and the inability to conceptually distinguish the realms of nature and spirit.

Bibliography Beiser, F. Hegel. New York: Routledge, 2005. Brandom, R. B. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Burbidge, J. W. ‘Conceiving’, in A Companion to Hegel, edited by S. Houlgate and M. Baur, 159–74. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 65 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 22.

66   Paul Redding Capozzi, M. and G. Roncaglia. ‘Logic and Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant’, in The Development of Modern Logic, edited by Leila Haaparanta, 78–158. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Dickey, L. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ferrarin, A. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fichte, J. G. ‘Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge’, in The Science of Knowledge, edited and translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Forster, M. N. Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Frank, M. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism. Translated by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2004. Harris, H. S. Hegel’s Ladder (2 volumes). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Hegel, G.  W. F. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1970. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publica­ tions, 1956. Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: 3 volumes. Translated and edited by M. J. Petry. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind:  Being Part Three of the ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’ (1830). Translated by William Wallace and A. V.  Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Translated by H. B. Nisbet with an introduction by Duncan Forbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Hegel, G. W. F. ‘How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug)’, in George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion:  One-volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopaedia Logic:  Part I  of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood and translated by H. B Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 volumes. Translated by E. S. Haldane. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Horstmann, R.-P. ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an Argument for a Monistic Ontology’. Inquiry 49, no. 1 (2006): 103–18. Houlgate, S. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic:  From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette:  Purdue University Press, 2006.

Hegel (1770–1831)   67 Jaeschke, W. Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Translated by J. M. Stewart and P. C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pinkard, T. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pinkard, T. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pippin, R. B. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pippin, R. B. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Redding, P. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Redding, P. ‘Hegel, Aristotle and the Conception of Free Agency’, in Gunnar Hindrichs and Axel Honneth (eds.), Freiheit:  Stuttgarter Hegelkongress 2011, 389–404. Stuttgart:  KlettCotta, 2013. Ross, N. On Mechanism in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2008. Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Translated and edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Stern, R. Hegelian Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Taylor, C. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Tolstoy, Count L. What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow. New York: T. Y. Crowell & Co, 1887.

Chapter 4

Fr iedr ich Schl egel (17 72–1829) Dalia Nassar 4.1 Introduction Among the romantics, it is Friedrich Schlegel1 (1772–1829) who is most recognized for his contributions to philosophy.2 While he is best known for his work in the Athenäum, his definition of ‘romantic poetry’ and his literary criticism, Schlegel’s critique of foundationalism, his theory of knowledge, his philosophy of history, and his conception of Lebensphilosophie were equally important in shaping the romantic movement.3 Nonetheless, the nature and significance of Schlegel’s contributions to philosophy remain contested issues. Hegel famously described Schlegel’s philosophy as nothing more than ‘vanity’,4 and Goethe complained about Schlegel’s proclivity to ‘popularize’ ideas which were not his own.5 In a letter to Fichte, Schelling expresses alarm about Schlegel’s 1  All references to Schlegel’s work will be in the body of the text and made to the Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–). I will refer to the edition as KFSA followed by a volume number, a page number, and, if available, a passage or fragment number. 2  Hans Eichner writes in the Introduction to volume 18 of the KFSA, ‘While August Wilhelm Schlegel was devoted primarily to philology, Novalis and Tieck to poetry, and Schleiermacher to theology, Friedrich Schlegel could say that since 1790 metaphysics was the primary occupation of his life’ (‘Einleitung’, KFSA 18, ix). Similarly, Frederick Beiser writes: ‘If any single figure could claim to be the leader of the romantic circle, it would indisputably be Friedrich Schlegel. His energy, enthusiasm, and enterprise were the creative forces behind the Athenäum, the journal of the group; and his thinking laid the foundation for the aesthetics of romanticism. It was indeed Schlegel who formulated the concept of romantic poetry, from which the movement took its name and much of its inspiration’ (Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, 245). 3  One of the earliest critics to recognize the significance of Schlegel’s contribution to the philosophy of history and to Lebensphilosophie was Wilhelm Dilthey. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 262. 4  G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik Band 1, 103. 5  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke [Frankfurter Ausgabe], vol. 39, 395. For Goethe’s relationship to the Romantics, see Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 457–63.

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    69 intention to offer lectures on transcendental philosophy in Jena. It is one thing, Schelling writes, for Schlegel to spread ‘poetic and philosophical dilettantism’ in his own circle, but to influence students with his ideas was very disconcerting.6 After all, Schelling concludes, Schlegel has repeatedly contradicted himself: how could he intend to carry out transcendental philosophy while arguing that a philosophical system is impossible?7 Indeed, it is Schlegel’s critique of systematicity that won him both his greatest critics and his greatest admirers. Both Schelling’s bewildered statement and Hegel’s related claim that Schlegel’s notion of irony is a poetic exaggeration of the Fichtean I that nullifies morals and leads to empty subjectivity, exemplify the view taken by his critics.8 In contrast, Schlegel’s admirers praise precisely those aspects of his thought that Schelling and Hegel found so problematic: his critique of closure, his emphasis on irony, his notion of the fragment, and his claim that knowledge (absolute knowledge) cannot be achieved. This laudatory view of Schlegel’s philosophy has become particularly popular in recent years, largely motivated by certain affinities between his thought and postmodernism.9 Postmodern critics contend that Schlegel’s use of literary devices, and his move to literature, was a response to a ‘crisis’ in knowledge—as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy put it—which occurred in the wake of Kantian philosophy and symbolized the beginning of the end of systematic thought.10 Although Manfred Frank distances himself from postmodernism, he agrees in fundamental respects with postmodern interpretations of Schlegel. For one, he considers Schlegel’s project to involve a critique of systematic philosophy and first principles. Furthermore, he argues that Schlegel turns to literature and literary tools— such as allegory and wit—in order to point to or suggest (andeuten) an unknowable and un-presentable absolute.11 Now, while postmodern interpreters consider the absolute to be purely fictive, Frank insists that the absolute plays the necessary role of organizing knowledge, and thus functions as a regulative ideal.12 Nonetheless, Frank agrees with the premise that underlies the postmodern reading: Schlegel is primarily concerned with epistemological questions, and his aim is to challenge systematic philosophy and knowledge of the absolute.13 6 Schelling, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe [hereafter cited as HKA], 3/2, 271. 7 

HKA 3/2, 272.

8 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik Band 1, 103.

9 Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 2–3. Beiser’s point concerns Romanticism in general, and

not just Schlegel; however, I think it is an apt characterization of the recent reception of Schlegel in particular. 10  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 12. See also Azade Seyhan, Representation and its Discontents and Martha B. Helfer, The Retreat of Representation. 11  Although Manfred Frank’s interpretation is philosophical, it focuses on Schlegel’s use of literary devices—wit, irony—as a means by which to suggest or point to the absolute. See Frank, Unendliche Annäherung, 933–46, and Einführung, 291–7. 12  Frank argues that Schlegel’s notion of ‘relative truth’ relies on an ‘absolute’ that retains its integrity outside of or beyond consciousness. In ‘ “Alle Wahrheit ist relativ, alles Wissen symbolisch” ’, Frank contends that for Schlegel (and the romantics in general) philosophy is inherently tied to a longing for a non-relative absolute, an ‘independent actuality’ (even if the absolute is beyond knowledge), which alone provides the basis for distinguishing truth and falsity. Thus Frank writes, ‘if there were no orientation toward a non-relative one, then the different allusions [Andeutungen] that have appeared in history would not have appeared as contradictions to one another and as such destroyed one another’ (Frank, ‘ “Alle Wahrheit ist relativ, alles Wissen symbolisch” ’, 434–5). 13  For a recent philosophical interpretation of Schlegel as an epistemologist, see Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel.

70   Dalia Nassar While such an interpretation is not entirely wrong, it is one-sided. Although Schlegel is clearly concerned with the question of knowledge, and is rightly considered a post-Kantian critical philosopher, his concerns extend beyond epistemology in the narrow sense. Already in the early 1790s, Schlegel evidenced a strong interest in history and life or living phenomena, and his goal was, as he put it, to develop a philosophy ‘for life and from out of life’ (KFSA 8, 60). In the following, I will argue that Schlegel’s contributions to philosophy—including his critique of first principles and systematic knowledge in general—must be understood in relation to his emphasis on history and historical knowledge, and his claim that philosophy must emerge from and in relation to life. Thus, in contrast to Hegel’s view of Schlegel’s philosophy as a poetic exaggeration of the Fichtean subject that results in the elimination of morals, I argue that Schlegel sought to develop a historically-informed philosophy and maintained that it is only through concrete knowledge of political and social realities that we can understand the nature of morality and achieve moral progress. In contrast to the postmodern interpretations, I argue that Schlegel did not entirely forgo the possibility of systematic knowledge, but developed a new conception of systematicity based on his understanding of living or organic beings.

4.2  Schlegel’s Philosophical ‘Debut’ Although it was not until the late 1790s that Schlegel began to publish philosophical writings—primarily in the form of reviews—his interest in philosophy began during his student years in Göttingen and Leipzig, as is evident in letters to his brother. Schlegel was thus quite honest when, in 1797, he wrote to the publisher Cotta, ‘eight years ago, I studied Kantian philosophy, and since then have not lost sight of it’ (KFSA 23, 356, no. 192). His philosophical studies, however, were by no means limited to Kant. By 1797 he had undertaken serious study of Plato, Fichte, Herder, Hemsterhuys, and Spinoza. It was not until 1796, however, when Schlegel moved from Dresden to Jena, that his philosophical interests and activities peaked. On the way to Jena, Schlegel stopped in Weißenfels to visit Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), who had been occupied with the Wissenschaftslehre. By August 1796, however, Novalis had become sceptical of Fichte’s premises.14 A  year later, Schlegel warmly recalls this short visit, writing to Novalis that he wished they could have another chance to ‘fichticize’ (KFSA 23, 371, no. 205). Whatever the topics of 14  From the end of 1795 through 1796, Novalis was occupied with studying the Wissenschaftslehre, and his notes from that time, the so-called ‘Fichte-Studien’, evidence both his deep interest and understanding of Fichte’s philosophy, as well as the beginning of some very significant critiques of Fichte’s methodology. In letters to Schlegel from 1796, Novalis similarly illustrates an awe of Fichte as well as a caution towards him. Thus, in July of that year, he writes that ‘I owe my excitement to Fichte; he is the one who woke me up and keeps my intellectual fires burning’, but then adds that he is also reading Spinoza and Zinzendorf, ‘who have grasped the infinite idea of love and have divined the method of realizing themselves for it as well as realizing it for themselves on this speck of dust. I am sorry that I have not yet been able to see anything of this vision in Fichte’ (Novalis, Schriften 4, 188). In July of 1797, Novalis’ critique of Fichte becomes more articulate and direct. He writes to Schlegel: ‘Fichte cannot come out of the Wissenschaftslehre, at least without an internal shift [Selbstversetzung], which appears impossible to me’ (Schriften 4, 230).

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    71 their conversations may have been, clearly Fichte and the Wissenschaftslehre were at their centre.15 In the same letter to Cotta quoted previously, Schlegel directs the publisher to his recent review of Niethammer’s Philosophisches Journal (1797) in order to demonstrate his knowledge of recent philosophy and convince Cotta of the distinctiveness of his ideas and style.16 This review, he remarks, is the only work which he has published that ‘could reasonably demonstrate what I am capable of undertaking in this discipline’ (KFSA 23, 356, no. 192).17 15

  Before going to Jena Schlegel composed a review of Jacobi’s novel Woldemar. In recent years, this review has been hailed as Schlegel’s first critique of Fichte and transcendental philosophy. However, upon its publication, the review was considered to be very much in line with Fichte. Thus Ernst Behler relates that ‘for many contemporaries the review was understood as a judgment following Fichte. At that time Fichte and Schlegel were in close personal contact, and J. F. Reichardt, in whose journal Deutschland the debate appeared, had at first offered the review of Woldemar to Fichte’ (Behler, ‘Einleitung’, KFSA 8, xxxiv). Rudolf Haym (who considers Schlegel to be a follower of Fichte in general) sees the review as an elaboration of Fichtean principles, and argues that Schlegel’s notion of a Wechselerweis (alternating principle or reciprocal proof) is nothing other than the Fichtean positing of I and not-I. See Die Romantische Schule, 219–32. Indeed, there is reason to agree with Haym’s interpretation, as Schlegel himself explains that the Wissenschaftslehre is based on two fundamental premises and not one. The first is that the I should posit itself, the second is that the I posits itself. They are irreducibly different, but nevertheless one is not higher than the other. For this reason, he writes in 1796 that the Wissenschaftslehre is based on a Wechselgrundsatz (KFSA 18, 36, no. 193). In contrast to Haym’s interpretation, Manfred Frank writes:  the appearances of the Wechselerweis are indeed many, but unclear. A possible interpretation can be of a fragment in which the self-positing alternating [wechselseitig] statements are presented as follows: ‘The I posits itself ’ (or, the absolute positing = Being: ‘I am’) and ‘The I should posit itself.’ If one of them were evident for itself, it would need no Wechselerweis (or ‘Wechselgrundsatz’). That means that Schlegel does not agree with Fichte’s positing of a singular ground statement ‘The I posits itself absolutely’; for this statement does not support itself. (Frank, ‘ “Alle Wahrheit ist relativ, alles Wissen symbolisch” ’, 420)

Frank’s view has become the more prevalent in recent interpretations of Schlegel’s development and his relation to Fichte, and implies that Schlegel began to formulate his critique of the Wissenschaftslehre prior to going to Jena. I will not enter into this debate, as my concern is not with showing that Schlegel was (or was not) a critic of Fichte prior to moving to Jena. Rather, my concern is to elaborate how Schlegel’s interest in transcendental idealism was always coupled with an equally deep interest in history and empirical knowledge. Thus, my claim is that Schlegel’s critique of Fichte involves more than his rejection of a first unconditioned principle. I will discuss Schlegel’s conception of a system (section 4.4) and his critique of the first principle (section 4.5) in relation to this larger project. 16  Schlegel is at pains to convince Cotta that his writings would sell because—although they are philosophical—they are ‘thoroughly not of the kind which simply remain unsold. I am brash enough to promise you with some certainty, that they would create a sensation for the late public’ (KFSA 23, 355, no. 192). For Schlegel, style was a significant theme, particularly because he thought it necessary that philosophy be more accessible to the general public. In his essay ‘On Philosophy. To Dorothea’ [Über die Philosophie. An Dorothea], Schlegel discusses the history of philosophy, and strongly encourages his interlocutor (and women in general) to study philosophy (KFSA 8, 41–62). Stylistically the essay seeks to mirror the kind of intimate dialogue that took place at a salon, such that Schlegel was not only inviting women to participate in philosophy, but also challenging the conventional philosophical style. 17  The review is of the first four volumes (1795–6) of the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft teutscher Gelehrten. It appeared in issue number 90 (March 1797) of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,

72   Dalia Nassar Schlegel’s review was well received. In his Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik, Schelling describes it as offering ‘the first strong and apt word on the Wissenschaftslehre’,18 and in the ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, Fichte speaks of its author as ‘ingenious’ [geistreich].19 Schlegel himself was clearly satisfied with the review—not because of the praise that it had received, but, as he explains to Novalis, because in it ‘I have completely achieved my innermost intention’ (KFSA 23, 363 no. 197). It is in this review, Schlegel elaborates, that he has finally made his ‘debut on the philosophical stage’ (KFSA 23, 363 no. 197). Although the review largely consists of synopses and analyses of essays that appeared in the first two volumes of the Journal, the question that motivates the review, as well as its conclusion, offer significant insights into Schlegel’s own philosophical programme.20 Schlegel commences the review by agreeing with Niethammer’s emphasis on praxis in theories of morality, and contrasting it with Kant and Fichte’s conceptions of morality. Both Kant and Fichte, he argues, secure morality through the notion of an absolute subject. However, by granting the absolute subject absolute freedom, they infinitely distinguish it from the empirical subject (KFSA 8, 16). This has the paradoxical implication that all ‘practical self-determination can only be thoroughly mediated [durchaus mittelbar]’ (KFSA 8, 16). In other words, the empirical subject’s self-determination is dependent on (mediated through) something other than itself (KFSA 8, 16). The problem with this situation is that it leaves the empirical subject incapable of self-determination: ‘a thoroughly mediated self-determination already contains an internal contradiction; there would be no self-determination and no self ’ (KFSA 8, 16). While Kant and Fichte were able to provide a pure conception of morality, they were unable, Schlegel argues, to offer a concrete conception of morality and moral development (sittliche Bildung) (KFSA 8, 18). Schlegel had been occupied with the question of moral development since at least 1795, when he composed a review-essay of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795). In his Essay on the Concept of Republicanism [Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus], Schlegel argues that Kant’s notion of perpetual peace is problematic because it does not offer a political answer to a political question. According to Schlegel, Kant’s notion of perpetual peace is to be attained through ‘the great artist, nature’ (KFSA 7, 23). This answer, Schlegel contests, is entirely unsatisfactory, for while it provides ‘the external occasions of destiny [for the] realization of eternal peace’, it does not explain ‘whether the inner development of humanity leads to it’. In other words, by relying on a vague notion of ‘nature’, Kant does not offer a concrete political theory that would adequately explain human development and the eventual achievement of peace. Kant remains on the transcendental level, and thus does

and Schlegel republished it in 1801, with only minor changes in a volume which contains works by him and his brother, titled Charakteristiken und Kritiken. 18 

HKA 1/8, 260. This appears in a footnote in Fichte’s ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, which came out in volume five of Niethammer’s Journal, pages 319–78. See Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 1, 469. 20  The review offers a comprehensive, though not detailed, account of the essays that appeared in the Journal. These include a number of works by Niethammer himself, an essay by Maimon, Schelling’s Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1795–6), a work by Christian Erhard Schmid on the Wissenschaftslehre, and Fichte’s response to Schmid. 19 

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    73 not take account of the historical, political, and moral circumstances which directly concern the development of political persons and laws. ‘The purposiveness of nature’, Schlegel writes, is here entirely indifferent; only the (actual) necessary laws of experience could accomplish a future success. The laws of political history and the principles of political education are the only data, from which it can be proven, ‘that perpetual peace is not an empty idea, but a task, which will be achieved over time’. (KFSA 7, 23)

Ultimately, Kant’s political philosophy remains too abstract, based on transcendental principles as opposed to concrete knowledge, and is therefore incapable of explicating political persons, institutions, and futures.21 Schlegel reiterates this critique in his review of Niethammer’s Journal, albeit in slightly different terms. Any philosophy that seeks to understand and explain moral and political reason, he argues, must be concerned with understanding the laws and conditions of culture and history. Moreover, any philosophy that seeks to understand human beings must, above all, be concerned with human development and its actualization in and through political institutions. Schlegel remarks: should the law of freedom not become a law of nature of [a person], then his nature must have already been free. For the human being to mature . . . he must have already gone through an earlier stage of moral education [sittliche Bildung], which could not have been the first [stage], since experience teaches that the culture of morality [Kultur zur Sittlichkeit] must begin with the taming of animality. (KFSA 8, 18)

In other words, morality can only be achieved through moral education. The problem with both Kant and Fichte’s accounts of morality concerns their lack of a rigorous notion of education and development, and their corresponding disinterest in the historical, political, and cultural contexts in which human beings dwell and through which they can develop. Kant and Fichte thus overlooked the central question of education or development within their practical philosophies. Moral philosophy, Schlegel emphasizes, must seek to explain what ‘the essential steps of moral development’ are and how moral limitations ‘can be overcome step by step’ (KFSA 8, 18). Schlegel concludes the review with a discussion of the goals of a philosophical review. First he remarks that a review of a philosophical text must itself be philosophical. Thus the ‘reviewing and producing capacity appear to be inseparably connected’. This implies that the reviewer must not only be concerned with describing the content of the work under review, but also with ‘characterizing’ and determining the ‘worth’ of the work (KFSA 8, 30). But how is a reviewer to determine philosophical worth? The difficulty is two-fold. On the one hand, a philosophical reviewer necessarily holds his or her own position on a particular topic, and thus approaches a work from his or her own perspective (KFSA 8, 32). On the other hand, philosophical worth cannot be entirely determined on the basis of a principle or goal that is external to a philosophical system.

21 

Schlegel’s aesthetics are also decidedly based on an understanding of the cultural context of the artwork. He writes, for instance, that to understand ancient Greek comedy, it is necessary to achieve ‘a complete knowledge of the Greeks’ (KFSA 1, 20).

74   Dalia Nassar The question then is: how can a philosopher attribute worth to a system that is not his or her own? At this time, Schlegel notes, there is no science that provides the necessary tools for making sound judgments on other philosophical systems. Rather, contemporary reviewers either postulate a principle according to which they judge a philosophical work (a principle that is external to the work), or they consider the work merely polemically and thus offer no insight into its worth (KFSA 8, 31). This situation can only be remedied, Schlegel argues, if philosophers learn a lesson from natural historians.22 Natural historians, he explains, seek to classify the products of nature independently of any particular system. In so doing, they do not attempt to grasp the ‘inner ground’ or organization of a natural object by deducing the parts and their relations, but rather by observing the relations between the parts and thus understanding their development in context. They seek ‘to determine [the object’s] crises, grasp the tendency in its path, and designate the indications of its striving’ (KFSA 8, 31). Such ‘historical suggestions’, he writes, illuminate the ‘spirit of the age’ and are the least one can expect from a philosophical review (KFSA 8, 32). The philosophical reviewer must therefore be more than a philosopher; he or she must also be a historian of philosophy. Thus, the science that is still lacking is none other than the science of the history of philosophy. Transcendental philosophers were wrong, Schlegel concludes, because they did not incorporate history, development, and transformation into their conceptions of philosophy, the human being, and reality.23 Yet, both philosophy and its object—being, reality— are a process ‘which proceeds in infinitely many directions towards the infinite’ (KFSA 8, 31). This means that the very character of philosophy can only be grasped through understanding the history of philosophy. It also means that reality cannot be grasped through pure thought alone but requires empirical knowledge. Only in this way, Schlegel argues, can the ‘gap’ between transcendental and empirical, thought and experience be overcome, and an understanding of the human being achieved (KFSA 1, 627).

4.3  Philosophy as the History of Philosophy In the winter semester of 1800–1, Schlegel offered lectures on transcendental philosophy at the University in Jena (known as the ‘Jena Lectures’ or the ‘Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy’). This was an important opportunity, not only because it provided Schlegel with his first chance to lecture to students, but also because it allowed him to formulate his own conception of transcendental philosophy and thus distinguish himself from both Fichte and Schelling’s versions. In these lectures, Schlegel accomplishes a two-fold feat. On the one hand, he argues for the significance of history in philosophy, particularly with 22  See also KFSA 1, 628, where Schlegel similarly claims that, while there is now a natural history of plants and animals, there remains no history of humanity ‘which can earn the name of a science’. 23  In a letter to Novalis, Schlegel recounts with horror Fichte’s statement that he’d much rather ‘count peas’ than study history (KFSA 23, 333, no. 169). And in notes he critically remarks that Fichte ‘had absolutely no interest in the historical and technical’ (KFSA 18, 3, no. 2). Schlegel also finds Kant’s lack of historical knowledge and understanding to have been deeply problematic for his aesthetic theory (KFSA 18, 19, no. 10).

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    75 regard to overcoming the gap between theory and practice, transcendental and empirical. On the other hand, he establishes the historical character of philosophy, and shows how philosophical methodology must itself become historical.24 At first sight, the Jena Lectures evidence a remarkable proximity to transcendental philosophy as practiced by Fichte and Schelling. However, this is not entirely surprising in light of the fact that one of the goals of the Lectures was to offer students an understanding of transcendental philosophy. There is, however, a second, more significant reason for Schlegel’s adoption of Fichte’s premise. As previously discussed, Schlegel argued that it is impossible to determine the worth of a system of philosophy by external principles. Thus, in order for Schlegel to assess transcendental philosophy, he must proceed along transcendental-philosophical lines. Like Fichte and Schelling, Schlegel commences the Lectures with an original postulation, or abstraction from everything relative or unessential. The result of this abstraction, he explains, is the ‘infinite’, that is, reality or being. However, Schlegel continues, the very positing of the infinite implies an act of positing, in other words, it implies consciousness. The infinite, then, is always accompanied by a positing consciousness such that the two are equally original. Philosophy, therefore, must be based on two poles: the pole of absolute reality, and the pole of consciousness (KFSA 12, 4). However, in spite of an affinity between Schlegel’s method and Fichte and Schelling’s, there are important differences. For one, Schlegel does not maintain that the original abstraction leads to an absolute I or self; rather, he argues that consciousness is one aspect or pole in philosophy, that stands alongside another, equally necessary, pole. Furthermore, he does not go on to locate the two poles in a higher third, an absolute or unconditioned first principle. While Fichte and Schelling both argued that only a system which is based on an unconditioned first principle can achieve necessity, Schlegel’s claim is that necessity emerges out of reciprocal determination. In other words, it is the fact that the two principles determine and are determined by one another—that they emerge only in relation to one another—that makes them absolutely necessary. Thus, rather than placing the infinite and consciousness within a higher third, and elaborating their relation in terms of an original unity, Schlegel maintains that they are absolutely necessary precisely because they arise only in relation to one another (KFSA 12, 25).25 In addition, Schlegel’s agenda is not purely transcendental. After explicating the necessity of the two poles, he adds that the two positions can be traced back to particular figures in the history of philosophy, namely Spinoza and Fichte. Spinoza represents the view of absolute realism, while Fichte represents subjective idealism. Subjective idealism, Schlegel explains, was the necessary result of (and opposing pole to) Spinoza’s absolute realism; it was the only possible philosophical system that could follow Spinoza’s absolute substance. Thus, instead of remaining on the plane of transcendental deductions, Schlegel transitions 24  In many ways, Schlegel’s true predecessor and possibly most significant influence is Herder, who had already argued for the significance of history and historical understanding in philosophy. For a detailed explication of Herder’s influence on Schlegel, see Michael Forster, German Philosophy of Language, esp. 12–35. 25  Schlegel argued from as early as 1796 that a system of philosophy need not be based on an original and absolute first principle, but rather on two reciprocally determining principles. See note 17 and section 4.5.

76   Dalia Nassar to the plane of history, that is, the history of philosophy, and seeks to show parallels between actual historical development in philosophy and transcendental philosophy. This move, while slight, is extremely significant. Its claim is that the transitional necessity between moments or epochs in the history of consciousness or the self, which Fichte and Schelling had reserved for transcendental derivations, can in fact be found in history. There is, in other words, necessity in history. In the Jena Lectures, Schlegel provides a rough elaboration of the history of philosophy, and of the necessary transitions between different philosophical perspectives. Although he does not provide the detail of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Lectures share quite a bit with Hegel’s work. In the same way that Schlegel points to Spinoza and Fichte as representatives of two necessary stages of philosophical development, he also identifies different epochs of consciousness with specific schools of thought. Dogmatism, for example, is the ‘epoch of principles’ which concerns itself with determination (KFSA 12, 12). Idealism, by contrast, is the ‘epoch of ideas’ and is concerned with knowing the infinite (KFSA 12, 13). In addition, Schlegel explains the transitions from one epoch to the next in terms of error and the recognition of error (KFSA 12, 14). The conclusion of one epoch is necessitated by a recognition of error, which is worked out in the following epoch. The transformations within the history of philosophy are therefore self-transformations incited by the development or evolution of consciousness, such that every transition leads to a higher level of understanding and greater complexity.26 In the years that follow, Schlegel continued to explicate the history of philosophy in relation to the history of consciousness. The lectures that he delivered in Cologne between 1804 and 1806, titled ‘The Development of Philosophy in Twelve Books’ [Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern], are the fruit of this research. The goal of these lectures, Schlegel explains, is to show ‘how a system links to another, how it arose from out of the other, and the whole unfolding of this successive development should be traced back, where possible, to its first source’ (KFSA 12, 163). To do this, he offers a detailed analysis of the development of philosophy, and explicates the transitions from one perspective to the other as arising out of a necessity that is internal to the perspective. Thus his method is not purely transcendental; rather, it is largely based on careful study of the history of philosophy, which seeks, above all, to understand each philosophical perspective from within, and thereby grasp its internal coherence and meaningfulness. It is from within each philosophical system that Schlegel seeks to explain how transitions between epochs or perspectives occur: an internal incoherence or error is recognized, so that it becomes necessary to develop a different position. His goal, therefore, is to locate necessity in the transitions, rather than impose it upon them. Furthermore, Schlegel emphasizes that the aim is not to negate or cancel previous perspectives, and thereby prove one’s own as the only correct or possible perspective. Rather, the aim is to understand the unfolding of philosophy, and thus grasp philosophy through its history.27 Only by doing philosophy in this way, he contends, 26  It is highly likely that Hegel attended Schlegel’s lectures. See Ernst Behler, ‘Zum Verhältnis von Hegel und Friedrich Schlegel in der Theorie der Unendlichkeit’, 119–41. The proximity of their thought should not, however, dilute their differences. See Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetics, 67–77. 27  In the same way that philosophy can only be understood through its history, so Schlegel argued that literature too can only be understood through its history. Thus in his ‘Lectures on the History of European Literature’ (1803–4) he remarks that ‘the new cannot be understood without the old’, because ‘literature can only be understood as a whole [ist durchaus nur im ganzen verständlich]’ (KFSA

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    77 can we truly appreciate previous philosophical views (recognize their worth) and, most importantly, understand the meaning (and task) of philosophy. In this way, Schlegel also seeks to close the gap between empiricism and theory. By bringing history into philosophy, and locating necessity within history, he does nothing less than unite empirical knowledge and philosophical or theoretical necessity—a goal, he remarks, which can only be accomplished through history (KFSA 12, 96–7). In spite of similarities to Hegel’s later thought, Schlegel’s understanding of the history of philosophy is not ultimately driven to achieve closure or provide an absolute perspective. Instead, he maintains that a final perspective can never be achieved, because knowledge is infinitely perfectible. This means that no system can be complete, and instead we must accept an incomplete or infinitely perfectible system (KFSA 18, 100, no. 857).28 Schlegel’s notion of an ‘incomplete’ system does not—at least at first sight—seem to make sense. After all, the very concept of system appears to negate the notion of incompletion. The question then is: in what way did Schlegel understand his system to be incomplete? And, what did Schlegel mean by ‘system’?

4.4  A ‘System of Fragments’ Throughout his early writings, Schlegel was interested in the idea of a system and systematic knowledge. This interest, however, was accompanied by a sense of caution toward systematicity and by scepticism toward first principles and deductive reasoning. Indeed, his use of the fragment illustrates a resistance to systematic completion and confirms his critical attitude toward closure. In the ‘Athenäum Fragments’ [Athenäums-Fragmente], Schlegel famously remarks that ‘it is equally deadly for the spirit to have a system and not to have one. It must therefore decide to unite them both’ (KFSA 2, 173, no. 53). However, even on the basis of this critical remark, it is clear that Schlegel was not entirely opposed to systematicity. In fact, he often described his work as systematic and characterized himself as a systematic thinker: in notes from 1798, he writes that ‘since everywhere in poetry and philosophy I have from the beginning steered toward the system, then I suppose I am a universal systematist’ (KFSA 18, 38, no. 214). Already in 1793, Schlegel began to formulate his conception of a system, describing it to his brother as a ‘many-sided’ system that cannot be reduced to a singular or final meaning (KFSA 23, 129–39; 143). It was not until the end of 1796 and beginning of 1797, however, that Schlegel developed his idea of system in more detail. This may not be a coincidence, given that it was at that time that he began to think about the fragment, and composed his first collection of fragments, the ‘Critical Fragments’ [Kritische Fragmente; also known as the Lyceum-Fragmente]. Indeed, it was in 1797 that Schlegel described his system as a ‘system of fragments’ and spoke of himself as a ‘fragmentary systematician’ (KFSA 18, 100, 11, 5 and 11, respectively). The Lectures seek to explain the nature of literature through the history of literature. 28 

See also Schlegel’s claim in ‘On Philosophy. To Dorothea’ that ‘philosophy is infinite and can never be completed’ (KFSA 8, 59). The reason for this, he explains, is because to understand philosophy one must understand the whole of philosophy—its entire history—which is, however, an infinite task.

78   Dalia Nassar no. 857; KFSA 18, 97, no. 815).29 In turn, in 1798 and 1799 Schlegel composed the ‘Athenäum Fragments’, which include fragments by Novalis, Schleiermacher, and A. W. Schlegel, and the ‘Ideas’ [Ideen]. Although he abandoned the form of the fragment after 1799, and published only these three collections, the fragment played a central role in Schlegel’s thought. For him, the fragment was not only an important literary and philosophical concept, but also a significant tool for developing his ideal system. While the fragmentary form of an ancient fragment is unintentional—primarily due to historical circumstance—the modern fragment is intentionally or consciously a fragment.30 The modern fragment aims to remain open, and thus consciously resists closure. The distinctive characteristic of the fragment is its form, which instantiates a tension that is foreign to a self-enclosed system. In contrast to a principle (Satz) in a completed system, or a moment within a self-enclosed whole, the fragment refuses to be subsumed under a higher concept, refuses to be cancelled within a higher unity. A  hierarchical system functions through the supersession of lesser principles into higher, more universal principles. The fragment, however, cannot be subsumed by higher concepts precisely because it resists a final or singular meaning. Thus the fragment, unlike a moment within a completed system, retains a degree of independence from the whole, and resists the systematic goal of arriving at a final and unchangeable meaning. Furthermore, Schlegel argues, a fragment is neither a static object nor an abstract concept, but ‘a self-determined and self-determining thought’ (KFSA 18, 305, no.  1333). Echoing Novalis’ view that a fragment is a ‘seed’ for further thought, Schlegel describes the fragment as a ‘living idea’ that incites thought and thus individuation: through the fragment, the reader is called to think and thus develop her or himself further (KFSA 18, 139, no. 204).31 In addition, Schlegel maintains that a fragment does not function as a proof in a chain of proofs; it is not a principle that can be deduced nor is its meaning evident only in relation to further proof. Rather, as a ‘self-determining thought’, a fragment achieves a certain unity, which can only be described as ‘individual’ (KFSA 18, 305, no. 1338; KFSA 18, 139, no. 204). In the Jena Lectures, Schlegel explains that the individual arises when undifferentiated unity (‘substance’) transforms itself through differentiation (KFSA 12, 34).32 The individual is thus at once unified and differentiated, or as Schlegel puts it, ‘the individual as substance is a whole and the parts which arise out of duplicity’ (KFSA 12, 39). This ‘unity in difference’ 29  Schlegel also writes ‘the fragment is the actual form of the philosophy of nature’ (KFSA 2, 100, no. 859), and ‘the true form of universal philosophy is fragments’ (KFSA 2, 114, no. 204). 30  Michel Chaouli explicates the important distinction between a fragment and an aphorism, noting that ‘if the aphorism attempts to bound the horizon of our understanding by offering a central point of focus, the very generic structure of the Schlegelian fragment aims at breaking such an understanding wide open’ (Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetics, 55). Similarly, he distinguishes between the modern and ancient fragment. While the ancient fragment is a remainder of something that was once whole, and is thus a symbol of a historical unity, the modern fragment ‘is made fragmentary’, that is, it is a fragment in its very intention, and thus disrupts the goal of unity (Chaouli, 59). 31  On Novalis’ conception of thinking as free self-activity, see Schriften 2, 584, no. 249; Schriften 2, 271, no. 256; Schriften 2, 373–4, no. 35. 32  In the ‘Athenäum Fragments’, Schlegel similarly notes that individuality does not only imply complexity but also ‘real, historical unity’ (KFSA 2, 205, no. 242).

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    79 is the essence of a self-forming or self-determining individual. For this reason, Schlegel goes on, ‘the individual is the expression of form’ (KFSA 12, 39). As the source of both unity and difference, form is the source of self-determination or self-formation (KFSA 12, 37). The kind of unity that arises through self-determination defies closure precisely because it depends on internal (or self-) differentiation, transformation, openness. In other words, it is a unity that implies difference, such that transformation is an inherent aspect of the unity. Thus, as self-forming, the fragment remains open to transformation and new meaning. But how exactly does this take place? To answer this question, we must take a closer look at Schlegel’s notion of a ‘system of fragments’. On the basis of Schlegel’s understanding of the fragment, it is clear that the ‘system of fragments’ cannot be a closed whole or an all-subsuming unity that resolves into one final moment or principle. However, it remains unclear as to whether the system of fragments is an aggregate (rather than a unity) composed of mutually exclusive, infinitely contradictory terms. Throughout 1797 and 1798 Schlegel was occupied with understanding the nature of the relations between fragments and developing ‘harmony’ within a system of fragments.33 In a letter to his brother from the beginning of December 1797, he explains that his goal in ordering fragments for the Athenäum is to ‘seek universality in an orderly way, not separate philosophical and critical fragments, as in the Lyceum . . . but mix [them], and to that also add moral [fragments]’ (KFSA 24, 51–2). On 5 December, he once again brings up the question of ‘grouping’ the fragments, this time describing it in musical terms. The relations between fragments, he writes, must be like ‘many voices or instruments harmonizing in music’ (KFSA 24, 56). And in March of 1798, as the brothers were putting the final touches to the first volume of the Athenäum, Schlegel emphasizes the significance of grouping the fragments in a particular way such that they present ‘a whole’ and employs the musical metaphor to explain his particular ordering (KFSA 24, 102). He draws parallels between ordering fragments and the arrangement of a ‘great symphony’ and an ‘overture’ (KFSA 24, 103 and 44). Schlegel also employs the metaphor of a natural organism to describe the system of fragments, writing, for instance, ‘the more organic, the more systematic’ (KFSA 16, 164, no. 940), and again, ‘systems must grow; the seeds in each system must be organic’ (KFSA 16, 165, no. 953). This is not surprising given his characterization of the fragment as a ‘living idea’. The unity that underlies the natural organism and the musical work is not a predetermined unity, a blueprint that precedes and thus informs or forms the parts. Rather, it is a unity that emerges in and through the simultaneous harmonizing of the parts and their relations. In both cases, the whole is composed of distinctive and independent parts that are nonetheless unified. On the one hand, each of the parts contributes to the development of the whole (the organism or the piece of music), such that this development determines the different roles and relations of the parts. On the other hand, the development does not cancel the distinctiveness of each of the parts, nor does it undermine their particular contributions to the whole.

33  For an investigation of the way in which Schlegel thematically organized fragments within his collections, see Hans-Joachim Heiner, Das Ganzheitsdenken Friedrich Schlegels, esp. 30–44.

80   Dalia Nassar The kind of unity exhibited in a work of music or a natural organism is thus neither a hegemonic, undifferentiated substance nor an overarching, abstract concept—both of which are cases of externally imposed unities. It is, rather, an absolutely immanent unity that cannot be separated from the parts, their developments and their relations. Furthermore, no part is negated on account of the other parts; rather, each part offers a distinctive expression of the whole. The parts are not superseded for the sake of the whole—or for the sake of a final (absolute) realization—but maintain their distinctive character. Moreover, in both the work of music and the natural organism, the unity involves a developing process, such that it emerges only through a successive unfolding in time. It is thus more apt to speak of musical unity as movement. Similarly, the unity of the organism must be understood in terms of natural metamorphosis, where each part evidences a moment in the development of the whole—each part is a member of an unfolding sequence. In turn, the temporality that is at work in music and organic nature is not merely futural— that is, a work of music does not simply move linearly toward the future. Rather, it is a simultaneous looking back and moving forward. For it is only through anticipating what is to come and reflecting on what has already come, that the unity of the work emerges. This means, first, that the kind of unity that Schlegel was after emerges through difference and transformation.34 Furthermore, it is dynamic, such that the relations between its parts emerge in time. It is, furthermore, composed of individuals that actively contribute to a living, developing process. They are inherently connected to one another; however, their connection is not based on deduction or derivation, but on participation in a dynamic and organized movement or development. The system of fragments, then, is a process, which emerges through the participation of its individual members. It is at once the ground of relations—that which makes the relations possible—and their realization. Schlegel characterizes his system as a circle, and thus contrasts it from a linear deductive system, based on a first principle or an original cause (KFSA 18, 518, no. 16).35 ‘A true system’, he writes, ‘is an integrated, structured unity of scientific stuff [wissenschaftlicher Stoff ], in thorough reciprocity [Wechselwirkung] and organic connection [Zusammenhang]’ (KFSA 18, 12, no. 84). The parts within this system do not relate to one another linearly or mechanically, because within an organic whole there is not one ultimate cause from which all the parts are derived. Rather, all the parts are both cause and effect, such that they are in a relation of reciprocal determination. For this reason Schlegel notes that ‘the whole of fundamental knowledge must be based on two ideas, principles, concepts, intuitions’, that is, 34  In a fragment published as part of Novalis’ Blüthenstaub (1798), Schlegel remarkably affirms difference within unity by drawing on nature: ‘If one has loyalty for the universe and cannot escape it, then there remains no way out except to end up with contradiction and to connect the opposed’ (KFSA 2, 164). 35  In his enthusiastic review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Schlegel speaks of a deeper kind of systematicity than the one we commonly understand. The higher kind of systematicity, he explains, requires a reader who has a ‘true systematic instinct’ and a ‘sense for the universe’. Only to such a reader will the ‘personality and living individuality of the work’, the ‘inner connections and affinities’ in it, reveal themselves (KFSA 2, 134). These inner connections and affinities, he elaborates, are based on a repetition of what preceded and an expansion upon it. Thus, ‘with every book a new scene and a new world opens up, and every book holds the seed for the one which follows and revises the pure output of the one which precedes with living force in its individual essence’ (KFSA 2, 135).

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    81 on the principle of reciprocal determination, as opposed to the notion of an unconditioned cause or final proof (KFSA 18, 518, no. 16).

4.5  Schlegel’s Critique of First Principles Already in 1796, Schlegel challenged the view that philosophy must be based on an unconditioned principle. In his review of Jacobi’s novel, Woldemar, he agrees with Jacobi’s critique of first principles, although he does not agree with his solution. ‘What if’, Schlegel suggestively remarks, ‘the ground of philosophy were an externally unconditioned, but reciprocally conditioned and self-conditioning Wechselerweis [reciprocal proof or alternating principle]?’ (KFSA 2, 72).36 In the place of an unconditioned ground or first principle from which all knowledge is derived, Schlegel offers the idea of reciprocally conditioned and conditioning grounds. He repeats this in notes taken during his time in Jena in 1796: ‘in my system the first principle is a Wechselerweis. In Fichte’s a postulate and an unconditioned principle’ (KFSA 18, 521, no. 22). Schlegel considered the source of the problem in both Fichte and Schelling’s systems to be their continued reliance on mathematics and mathematical construction as the model for philosophical system-building. Although Kant had distinguished mathematics and philosophy, Fichte and Schelling reclaimed its role in the development of philosophical knowledge and the generation of a system of philosophy.37 In contrast, Schlegel repeatedly argued that philosophical systematicity must not be modelled on mathematical construction. Rather, he writes, ‘a philosophical system has more similarities with a poetic and historical system than with a mathematical one, which is always considered to be uniquely [ausschließend] systematic’ (KFSA 18, 84, no. 650). In fact, Schlegel contests the very idea that mathematical knowledge yields systematicity at all—at least the kind of systematicity that he considered essential for philosophy: ‘as soon as philosophy becomes science, then there is history. Everything systematic is historical and vice versa. The mathematical method is exactly the anti-systematic’ (KFSA 18, 86, no. 671). There are two reasons for Schlegel’s rejection of the appropriation of mathematical construction for philosophical purposes. First, it necessitates the notion of an unconditioned first principle, an original postulate. Second, it leads to an inherently ahistorical 36  The idea of two mutually conditioning and conditioned principles, in the place of one unconditioned first principle, is central for Schlegel’s thinking and is present throughout his writings. Thus, in addition to Wechselerweis and Wechselbegriff, Schlegel also invokes ‘Wechselgrund’ (KFSA 18, 7, no. 36), ‘Wechselwirkung’ (KFSA 18, 88, no. 84; KFSA 18, 151, no. 335; KFSA 18 303, no. 1314; KFSA 18, 374, no. 515; KFSA 18, 507, no. 20; KFSA 12, 5; KFSA 13, 38), ‘Wechselgrundsatz’ (KFSA 18, 36, no. 193), ‘Wechselspiel’ (KFSA 18, 361, no. 489; KFSA 18, 361, no. 495), and ‘Wechselbegründung’ (KFSA 18, 510, no. 51). 37  See, for instance, Schelling’s essay ‘Allgemeine Uebersicht der neuesten philosophischen Literatur’, which was published over two years (1796–7) in Niethammer’s (and, by that point also Fichte’s) Philosophisches Journal (for the complete order in which it was published, see HKA 1/4, 3). In the 1809 edition of his works, Schelling republished it under the title, ‘Abhandlung zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre’.

82   Dalia Nassar conception of knowledge and philosophy.38 Let us begin by looking at the first of these two reasons. An unconditioned first principle, Schlegel argues, necessarily remains outside of the system of knowledge. After all, knowledge implies synthesis and determination, and the unconditioned must remain un-determined. The unconditioned, then, grounds the system of knowledge, but remains outside of it. This has several significant implications. First, it means that although the system strives to be a totality of knowledge—a ‘science’ as Fichte put it—it ultimately fails. A system cannot be a totality, a self-grounding whole, if its ground stands outside of it. Furthermore, if the unconditioned is outside the system, then it cannot be known through the system. This once again means that the system cannot be complete, for it does not account for the principle upon which it is constructed. Knowledge of the unconditioned principle must come from a source that is outside of the system, thereby relativizing systematic (deductive, synthetic) knowledge, and the ‘science of knowledge’ in general. Finally, opposition implies determination and delimitation, which means that the unconditioned cannot be truly unconditioned if it stands outside of and thereby in opposition to the system. The problem, Schlegel contends, has to do with the kind of thinking that underlies transcendental philosophy. While it appears that the first principle is absolutely immanent (the absolute self positing itself), as unconditioned, it is outside of the system, and thereby transcendent. Thus, rather than seeking to grasp reality from within—that is, in and through the phenomena—transcendental philosophy proceeds by positing an unconditioned that is necessarily external to the system of knowledge, that is, from without.39 Furthermore, by positing the ground of the system outside of the system, and thereby opposing it to the system, that is, to what is conditioned, transcendental philosophy unwittingly makes the unconditioned into something conditioned or determined.40 In turn, by positing an unconditioned, this mode of thought instantiates a duality between the self and the unconditioned (between the self as unconditioned and the conditioned self). This duality once again implies objectification—the (self as) unconditioned is opposed to (and thus delimited by) the (self as) conditioned. Ultimately, the notion of an unconditioned is dogmatic, because it implies positing an unjustified thing-in-itself that in turn leads to an

38  In the Cologne Lectures, Schlegel distinguishes between, on the one hand, logical and mathematical entities, which he maintains can be treated as atemporal, static things, and, on the other hand, all other entities, which, by contrast, must be recognized as inherently changing and historical (KFSA 12, 307ff.). For this reason, the rules of logic and mathematics, he contends, must not be applied to any other disciplines. 39  This is exactly Schlegel’s hermeneutic method which, he argues, must be used in interpreting works of art. Thus, in his interpretation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, he explains that the novel must be ‘understood on its own terms’ (KFSA 2, 133). Schlegel’s concern with developing a hermeneutics which would be able to overcome partiality and thus judge a work on its own terms is clearly connected to Herder’s goal, which, as Michael Forster writes, seeks ‘to resist a . . . strong temptation to evaluate particular works of literary or non-linguistic art in terms of genre-purposes and rules which they do not in fact aspire to realize in the first place, instead of in terms of those which they do’ (Forster, German Philosophy of Language, 16). 40 In Blüthenstaub, Novalis distinguishes between ‘the unconditioned (das Unbedingte)’ and ‘things (Dinge)’, drawing attention to the implicit claim that the unconditioned is not a thing (Schriften 2, 412, no. 1).

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    83 unjustified duality between subject and object, knower and known, activity and passivity.41 For this reason, Schlegel concludes, ‘Philosophy “in the true sense” has no first principle, no object, no determined task. The Wissenschaftslehre has a determined object (I and Not-I and their relation) and a determined reciprocal ground and thus also a determined task’ (KFSA 18, 7, no. 36). Schlegel’s rejection of an unconditioned principle goes hand in hand with his notion of a ‘system of fragments’ and its difference from a deductively achieved system. The unity of a deductive system is based on an unconditioned principle. This principle determines both the conceptual coherence of the system and the very process or method by which the construction of the system takes place. Guided by an ultimate goal or concept, deductive construction is not concerned with the place or role of a concept within a totality of concepts, but with deducing one concept from the other. Thus, the system is constructed entirely linearly, moving in a unilateral direction toward the goal of universality. Furthermore, the deductive system proceeds through subsumption, in which a less universal concept is subsumed under a more universal concept. Universality in this case is understood to mean the opposite of particularity; the less particular, the more universal a concept, and therefore the more it can subsume. Thus, the most universal concept is also the least particular, which is to say that the most universal concept (the concept that unifies the system and determines its construction) contains no particularity, no difference within itself. The unity that is achieved in a deductive system is therefore based on the elimination of difference. Both of these characteristics contrast with the system of fragments. In the first instance, the system of fragments cannot be determined by one ultimate, all-subsuming principle or concept in which difference and particularity are eliminated. Each fragment retains its distinctive character or meaning, such that no fragment can be reduced to or cancelled by another. Thus difference between the fragments is maintained. Furthermore, in a system of fragments, the unity is itself a process, and the system remains in a state of development. The relations between the different parts and between the parts and the whole are also determined by transformation, such that the parts cannot be reduced to particular objects or static concepts within the system, but are dynamic processes that emerge through organized interactions. Schlegel’s rejection of the first principle and of the transcendental method lead him to the conclusion that a different manner of thinking is necessary for the construction of a system of fragments—one that can grasp individual fragments, follow their development, and discern the necessity in their relations. Such a manner of thinking must not proceed through conceptual subsumption, that is, through the sequential cancelation of a lesser moment in a higher (more universal) one. Rather, it must be able to behold difference, without forsaking unity—it must, in other words, be able to grasp unity in difference. 41  In the Cologne Lectures, Schlegel explains that the ultimate problem with Fichte’s conception of intellectual intuition is the fact that the identity of intuition is founded on an original objectification of the self, which is then followed by an identification with the object. It is therefore not a real identification of the self (as knower) with itself (as knower), for the identity only occurs after the original objectification of the self (as known) (KFSA 12, 324ff.). For a more detailed account of Schlegel’s critique of Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition, see my The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804, 109–11.

84   Dalia Nassar In his Paris Lectures on the History of European Literature (1803–4), Schlegel claims that it is only through developing a ‘living, intuitive [anschauliches] picture of the whole’ that we can grasp ‘emergence and development’ (KFSA 11, 12).42 What does he mean by a ‘living, intuitive picture’, and how does it differ from the transcendental method? In turn, how can it construct a system of philosophy that is ‘through and through historical’ (KFSA 12, 93)?

4.6  A New Kind of Thinking In a letter from the fall of 1793, Schlegel speaks of a ‘kind of thinking [Denkart]’, which he was developing through reading history: ‘for the last few months, my favourite recuperation has been to follow the great puzzling path of historical events, and from out of that, a kind of thinking [Denkart] began to develop in me’ (KFSA 23, 144–5). A few years later, he remarks that only a historical method can adequately grasp organic unity and reciprocal relations (KFSA 18, 21, no. 36). And, in the Cologne Lectures, Schlegel claims that a historical perspective is alone capable of grasping the ‘emergence and character of what is living [des Lebendigen]’ (KFSA 12, 422). In contrast to the deductive procedure, Schlegel’s claim is that the historical method understands a thing (or a part) in terms of both its development and its multifaceted relations. From this perspective, the part is not construed as either cause or effect, and is thus not grasped as one thing opposed to another. Rather, the historical method focuses on its continued genesis in its multiple relations. A shift in attention thus occurs—from static objects, to dynamic processes—such that what is known is not an isolated thing, or a proof that can only be determined in relation to a chain of proofs, but connected individuals and their dynamic relations (KFSA 12, 307).43 Schlegel associates the historical method with ‘organic thought’ and the imagination (Einbildungskraft) (KFSA 18, 139, no. 213). For Schlegel, the imagination does not imply fantasy or falsehood, but is an apprehending capacity that ‘is free from the dominance of the thing’ (KFSA 12, 359). The imagination, he argues, is able to grasp the changing character of an object and thus discern the transitions in its development. To return to the example of music: what is necessary to experience a musical work is, first, a capacity that can apprehend the individual as individual—the particular chord. As such, however, it must 42  He contrasts this to, on the one hand, mere historical compilation of data, which can only offer a confused perspective, and, on the other, a priori systematic derivation, which would offer a few examples of every art from various time periods, without, however, explicating their internal structure, placing them in context or demonstrating their relations (KFSA 11, 12). 43  Schlegel writes: all insight into the essence of a thing is obtained only if we know its emergence according to its source, according to its ground and according to its purposes and laws of formation. Thus taken speculatively all concepts are genetic and all theory consists in genetic concepts. As soon as we no longer remain with the external characteristics, the concept of the thing disappears, like an invisible, dead carrier of the characteristics, and only the concept, the picture of life, emerges. We then obtain something thoroughly living—moving, where one emerges from out of the other and brings forth another. In short we obtain the insight into the history of the thing.(KFSA 12, 307)

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    85 not be fixated on an object—on this particular chord. Rather, it must be able to grasp the individual as it develops within the whole. The apprehending capacity must thus be able to move with the movement of the music, and thereby grasp the relations and transitions between the chords. The relations between the chords are twofold: on the one hand, they harmonize simultaneously; on the other, they succeed one another. The imagination must therefore behold the unity of the different chords at any particular moment as well as discern the necessary (and hence unified) development of the chords in succession. It must, in other words, grasp the unity of the whole in and through (temporal) differences. Otherwise, the work would collapse into an unrelated heap of musical chords. The key is the agility of the imagination—its ability to extend beyond fixed objects while at the same time grasping individuals and discerning their relations and development. In this way, the imagination grasps the unity within the multiplicity, the whole in and through the relations of its parts, and sees the parts in and through their connections to one another and the whole. The imagination, then, is the necessary hermeneutic tool through which thought is able to grasp the particular, without, however, losing sight of the whole. Through the imagination, Schlegel maintains, the individual—historical realities, particular persons, and views—comes to life (KFSA 12, 112). Through the imagination, moreover, relations between individuals are discerned, and a unity emerges: a differentiated, dynamic unity. In the years 1799 and 1800, Schlegel turned his attention to the imagination more concretely, composing a novel (Lucinde) and a dialogue (Conversation on Poetry), both of which offer lengthy ruminations on the nature of artistic presentation and imagination. It was also during that time that Schlegel began to formulate his notion of an encyclopedia and spoke of his ‘bible project’ to Novalis (KFSA 24, 207). For Schlegel, the goal of the encyclopedia was not only to develop a theory of art, but also be a work of art (KFSA 24, 205). As he saw it, it is only in a work where both form and content are determined by the plasticity of the imagination that insight into reality, life, and history can be achieved. It is, in other words, only in such a work that the division between thought and praxis, theory and empiricism, can be overcome.

4.7  Conclusion: Schlegel’s Philosophical Significance In recent years interest in Schlegel’s philosophical contributions has peaked, and scholars have come to regard Schlegel’s thought to be particularly relevant for contemporary discourse. More specifically, Schlegel’s ideas have been designated as proto-postmodern, evidencing scepticism toward systematic philosophy and absolute knowledge, and affirming irony and the infinite struggle to grasp an (inherently unknowable) absolute. However, in spite of Schlegel’s affinity to certain postmodern views, it would be mistaken to regard his critique of transcendental philosophy as a critique of all kinds of systems, or to interpret his notion of the fragment as an affirmation of absolute alterity or infinite contradiction. Rather, Schlegel’s critique of system was always coupled with

86   Dalia Nassar a different conception of systematic unity—a unity that emerges in and through difference and transformation. Moreover, Schlegel’s conception of the fragment and the system of fragments did not amount to a random compilation of infinitely opposed fragments. Rather, in his collection of fragments, Schlegel was at pains to achieve a harmony that he likened to that of a work of music, and at times described as a ‘symphonic harmony’. Finally, Schlegel’s critique of foundationalist systems (such as Fichte and Schelling’s) was not merely a critique of first principles, but also a critique of a way of thinking—one that is based on the ahistorical model of mathematical construction. The true system, as Schlegel saw it, was a historically rich, concrete system, which sought to locate unity and meaningfulness within the phenomena and their relations, rather than beyond them. Only in this way, he repeatedly argued, can philosophy surmount the gap between theory and practice, and thus become a philosophy that ‘is for life and from life’ (KFSA 8, 60). These ideas, I think, illustrate Schlegel’s significance and his continuing relevance. It is in his search for a philosophy that can truly speak to the empirical human being, and which can meaningfully disclose empirical phenomena—without, however, becoming mere empiricism—that Schlegel’s distinctive contributions lie.44

Bibliography Behler, Ernst. Friedrich Schlegel. Hamburg: Rowoht, 1966. Behler, Ernst. ‘Einleitung’ to vol. 8 of Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler, J. J. Ansett, and H. Eichner. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–. Behler, Ernst. ‘Unendliche Perfektabilität—Goldenes Zeitalter:  die Geschichtsphilosophie Friedrich Schlegels im Unterschied zu der von Novalis’, in Geschichte und Aktualität, ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller, 138–58. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1988. Behler, Ernst. ‘Zum Verhältnis von Hegel und Friedrich Schlegel in der Theorie der Unendlichkeit’, in Studien zur Romantik und zur idealistischen Philosophie 2, 119–41. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994. Beiser, Frederick. Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism:  The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism:  The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Beiser, Frederick. The Romantic Imperative:  The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Breazeale, Daniel, ed., Fichte’s Early Philosophical Writings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Chaouli, Michel. The Laboratory of Poetics: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Leben Schleiermachers, ed. M. Redeker. Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. Eichner, Hans. Friedrich Schlegel. New York: Twayne, 1970. Fichte, J. G. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte. Berlin: Verlag von Veit und Comp, 1845.

44  The research and writing of this article was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council DECRA Grant [DE120102402].

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)    87 Fichte, J. G. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth, H. Jacob, and H. Gliwitzky. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962–2012. Forster, Michael. German Philosophy of Language:  From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Frank, Manfred. ‘ “Alle Wahrheit ist relativ, alles Wissen symbolisch”: Motive der GrundsatzSkepsis in der frühen Jenaer Romantik (1796)’, Revue International de Philosophie 50, March 1996: 403–36. Frank, Manfred. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Frank, Manfred. ‘Unendliche Annäherung’: die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Frank, Manfred. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert. Albany: SUNY, 2004. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche [Frankfurter Ausgabe]. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke [Weimarer Ausgabe] hrsg. im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1919. Hardenberg, Friedrich von [Novalis]. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Richard Samuel, H.-J. Mähl, Paul Kluckhorn, and G. Schulz. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960–88. Haym, Rudolf. Die romantische Schule. Berlin: Gaertner, 1870. Hegel, G. W. F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik Band 1, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 12, ed. H. Glockner. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1953. Heiner, Hans-Joachim. Das Ganzheitsdenken Friedrich Schlegels. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971. Helfer, Martha B. The Retreat of Representation: the Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute:  The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth. Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Nassar, Dalia. The Romantic Absolute:  Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Richards, Robert. The Romantic Conception of Life:  Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Schelling, F. W. J. von. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. H. M. Baumgartner, W. G. Jacobs, and H. Krings. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1976–. Seyhan, Azade. Representation and its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Chapter 5

Schelli ng (17 75–1854) Markus Gabriel 5.1 Introduction Within the emergent and steadily increasing contemporary interest in nineteenth-century philosophy in the Anglophone world, Schelling is certainly the most widely neglected figure among the so-called German or Post-Kantian Idealists. Whereas the much greater attention paid to Schelling in German, French, and Italian scholarship has been inspired by Heidegger’s appreciation of Schelling as an important forerunner and by the prominence of Schelling’s various criticisms of Kant and Hegel, it is precisely these two factors that have motivated his dismissal in the Anglophone context. For in this context, Kant and Hegel are read in the light of their potential contribution to contemporary semantics and epistemology in a broad sense as well as their respective far-reaching ideas in practical philosophy. Even Fichte has been adopted because of his insistence that we need to further develop the pure concept of autonomy and free it from Kantian metaphysical constraints, such as transcendental idealism’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves.1 However, recent German literature on Schelling, beginning with Wolfram Hogrebe’s groundbreaking book Predication and Genesis and continuing with Manfred Frank’s work on Schelling, has rightly emphasized that Schelling himself can be seen as developing highly original ideas in semantics, epistemology, and some domains of practical philosophy.2 The difference in outlook between Schelling and his forerunners Kant and Fichte consists in his insistence that metaphysics is prior to any other discipline of philosophy. From a strictly Kantian perspective, Schelling seems to relapse into some form of pre-critical

1  Cf. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2  Cf. Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (München: Fink, 1992); Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007).

Schelling (1775–1854)   89 metaphysics, an objection constantly raised by Fichte.3 It usually goes unnoticed, however, that Hegel praises Schelling, particularly his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (the so-called Freedom Essay), as the highest development of speculative philosophy before Hegel himself.4 We do not know anything about Hegel’s reaction to most of Schelling’s work unpublished during Hegel’s lifetime, nor is it possible to speculate about his potential reaction to Schelling’s later philosophy. It is also not entirely clear to what extent any of Schelling’s various” attempts at systematizing the Kantian enterprise by giving it a different foundation are really incompatible with Kantian premises.5 However, there is no strictly historical reason for dismissing Schelling as an option for a contemporarily feasible version of Post-Kantian philosophy. If Hegel is an option, it is hard to see why Schelling should not be. Schelling’s published work alone comprises so many volumes and different forms of presentation of his philosophy, that it is impossible to cover it in a single article. What makes matters more complicated is that some of his posthumous later work has been as least as influential as his published books. This is particularly true of his later Philosophy of Mythology and Philosophy of Revelation, which famously inspired Kierkegaard and the various left-Hegelians who attended his Berlin lectures in the early 1840s. My own approach to Schelling is focused on a systematic interest in some of his fundamental ideas. Accordingly, I will not try in my article to give a historically comprehensive picture of Schelling, but will focus on the works and philosophical features that I believe to be most relevant for the contemporary debates that accept nineteenth-century philosophy as their starting point. It is impossible to give an adequate account of Schelling’s intellectual biography for the simple reason that most of Schelling’s thinking has not yet been reconstructed; there is much systematic scholarship yet to be done. The best Schelling biography is written by Xavier Tilliette and has not yet been translated into English.6 In the wake of Heidegger in the early 1950s there were far-reaching attempts to make sense of Schelling, most notably Habermas’ Bonn dissertation, Karl Jaspers’ book on Schelling, and Walter Schulz’ fairly influential Heidelberg habilitation thesis in which he argued that Schelling’s late philosophy is really the ultimate consummation of the very program of German Idealism as a whole.7 It is fair to say that many elements of Schelling’s so-called middle period (comprising the projects of the Freedom Essay, the Ages of the World, and also the less prominent Stuttgart Private Lectures) have gained some attention. The same holds for the late philosophy, his Philosophy of Mythology and his Philosophy of Revelation, due to the fact that both left-Hegelians and Kierkegaard were inspired by what they took 3  For an overview of this debate see Lore Hühn, Fichte und Schelling oder: Über die Grenze menschlichen Wissens (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994). 4  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–26, Volume III: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, tr. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 5  For a discussion of this see Axel Hutter, Geschichtliche Vernunft. Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). 6  Xavier Tilliette, Schelling. Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999). 7  Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (Bonn: Bouvier, 1954); Karl Jaspers, Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis (München: R. Piper, 1955); Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955).

90   Markus Gabriel to be an important critique of Hegel. However, the details of Schelling’s transitions and numerous attempts to state his position, including various forms of presentation (dialogues, treatises, lecture series, etc.) are hardly known, let alone systematically interpreted. Too much of Schelling scholarship until the late 1980s has been dedicated to reconstructing rough outlines of his development rather than focusing on the arguments in Schelling’s texts. For the purpose of this chapter, it might nevertheless be useful to provide a rough sketch of my own understanding of Schelling’s development or intellectual biography. It is widely accepted that there are at least four major phases in Schelling’s thinking. His first phase is epitomized by his System of Transcendental Idealism. The idea behind his first publications culminating in the System is to unify two tendencies he sees in Fichte’s version of transcendental idealism. On the one hand, Fichte, like Kant, refrains from broad ontological commitments and attempts to replace an analysis of how things in themselves really are by an account of how we can make sense of things accessible to truth-apt thought such that this account need not necessarily coincide with how things in themselves are. Yet, Schelling fears that this “transcendental modesty” leads to a devastating form of skepticism. If the framework of how things in themselves really are could be said to diverge entirely from our account of how they appear to us, then we could not rule out the possibility that the domain of things referred to (the appearances) might ultimately be undermined by their actual integration into a larger framework inaccessible to us. Therefore, Schelling tries to spell out a form of transcendental idealism that generates its own ontology. However, this leads him to the insight associated with his second phase, the phase of the Naturphilosophie, that we need to think of things in themselves in terms of nature, that is, in terms of an anonymous and pre-subjective development that happened to become aware of itself in our awareness of it.8 In this context, Schelling formulated an interesting version of neutral monism that certainly deserves critical attention, as it steers clear of the temptations of panpsychism and metaphysical materialism respectively. The third phase or middle period is usually defined by his new idea that the real problem of philosophy lies in our ways of thinking about freedom. The original thought laid out in this context is that there is a tension between systematic philosophy and the freedom of theory-building. Schelling does not so much ask how we can integrate our conception of ourselves as free agents into a disenchanted conception of a deterministic universe or nature, but rather wonders if we can think of the activity of philosophizing as articulating the relevant form of freedom. If the activity of philosophy is itself free, there has to be a sense in which the outcome is not determined in advance. And for Schelling this implies that we cannot think of the object of philosophy as a system already fully established independently of our way of thinking about it. That we think about the object of philosophy (whatever it ultimately is) as of something already out there (say in terms of an independent logical space of reasons laid out in advance) seems to be incompatible with our critical and dialogical attitude towards that object. For Schelling, this entails that we need to give an account of the temporality and historicity of philosophy without becoming mere

8  For a detailed reconstruction of this period and thought see Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London/New York, NY: Continuum, 2006).

Schelling (1775–1854)   91 historicists who give up on the idea of philosophical discoveries in the name of some sort of unbound constructivist attitude. This eventually motivates the ideas commonly attributed to Schelling’s late philosophy, his fourth and ultimate phase.9 Here Schelling unifies his earlier ideas by actually reconstructing the coming to be of philosophy from non-philosophical (mythological and theological) thought. He argues that systematic philosophy arose from developments in the history of human self-consciousness that were not yet autonomously directed at philosophy. Philosophy itself becomes the spontaneous result of what one might nowadays refer to as “cultural evolution.” However, Schelling thinks of the history of self-consciousness not in terms of an extension of the accidental evolution of human subjectivity in general from mere natural processes, but as a radical break. What happens in that break is first and foremost a “theogony,” by which Schelling conveys the thought that humanity begins with the idea of their Gods, that is, in particular, with the idea that nature is not just a meaningless domain of extended material of some kind or other, but rather a domain of intelligibility. However, the “theogonical process,”10 as Schelling calls it, in which consciousness is involved, misplaces its own expectation of intelligibility and hypostatizes it in the form of Gods gradually becoming more human. This leads to philosophy, which according to Schelling has not yet fully emancipated itself from theogony and still wrestles with metaphors and allegories generated by pre-philosophical self-consciousness.11 To sum this up, my own view is that there are not many systems or different Schellings, but that there really is one coherent line of thought that Schelling develops from different perspectives. In this respect, there is really no difference from Hegel, who also develops his system in different ways in his various periods. Schelling is continually working on finding the most adequate expression of his basic intuition and not constantly changing his thought, as a common mythical depiction of Schelling’s allegedly “Protean” nature suggests. His basic intuition is that subjectivity has to be integrated into a domain that is not of its own making, but that nevertheless is compatible with the fact that subjectivity arises within it. This even holds if by “subjectivity” we primarily refer to self-consciousness in the sense of any form of basic awareness of the fact that some facts only obtain because we refer to them. The very difference between facts that are thoroughly reference-dependent, as they only obtain by being referred to, and facts that do not depend at all on being referred to (what late Schelling calls “unprethinkable being”) has to be conceived of as a framework within which subjectivity takes place. It is therefore precisely not the absolute, as the absolute can only fully be understood as part of a relational network involving essentially both 9  I have laid out the details of this transition and the accounts involved in Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos. Untersuchungen über Ontotheologie, Anthropologie und Selbstbewußtseinsgeschichte in Schellings “Philosophie der Mythologie” (Berlin/New York, NY: De Gruyter, 2006) and Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York, NY/ London: Continuum, 2011). 10  See, for instance, SW, XII, 109. I discuss this further in Der Mensch im Mythos, §§12, 17. 11  This idea has been further developed by Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001) and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–96) but is even present in Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1969), §94. On this see Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London/New York, NY: Continuum, 2009), pp. 68–71.

92   Markus Gabriel pre- and non-subjective facts. Even though ultimately this distinction is not sufficiently clear, it might be helpful to summarize the various versions of this basic realist intuition by saying that Schelling’s objective idealism has always been fighting shy of subjective idealism. His so-called objective idealism roughly only maintains that subjectivity is ontologically objective, even if many of its defining features are subjective in the sense of existing only by being referred to by subjects. In what follows, I will focus on what I take to be the elements of Schelling’s philosophy most suitable for a primarily de re interpretation in Robert Brandom’s sense of the term, where such an interpretation isolates arguments and ideas from a historical figure and shows their ability to make an original contribution to contemporary concerns. A de dicto interpretation, on the contrary, is often seen as an attempt to discover historical details hitherto neglected in historical scholarship.12 It is interesting to note that any such interpretation will ultimately itself be guided by some hypothesis of interpretation, resulting in there actually being no purely de dicto interpretation. A pure de re interpretation runs the risk of missing precisely the originality of the approach of the figure under discussion, as it tends to be overly selective and sometimes only projects its own presuppositions anachronistically into the past. Thus, ultimately, de re and de dicto interpretations have to cooperate if we want to learn something from the history of philosophy that we did not already know by our own reflective efforts and that is nevertheless relevant for just these efforts. Such an engagement with Schelling has only begun in the Anglophone world, and my hope is that we will soon see more systematic or rational reconstructions of Schelling’s arguments both with respect to their place and time and to ours. This chapter will first focus (section 5.2) on the basic idea of a philosophy of nature. I will then consider (section 5.3) the Freedom Essay and Schelling’s arguments for the inevitability of a critical form of metaphysics. Lastly, I will discuss (section 5.4) his famous distinction between “negative” and “positive philosophy.” My overall interpretative assumption is that Schelling’s work is a genuine part of the Post-Kantian tradition in that his fundamental question is how the minimal logical form of propositional thinking is capable of grasping a structured reality always potentially independent from the way we represent it in propositional thinking. Schelling’s original methodological emphasis is on the fallibility of philosophy itself. He thinks of philosophy as a systematic production of concepts introduced to make sense of our way of grasping how things really are. He believes that this requirement of fallibility necessitates adherence to an enhanced version of a Kantian thing in itself. 13 Contrary to the most popular readings of Fichte and Hegel, Schelling thus always remains an ontological realist insofar as he defends a position in which reality itself might largely be utterly different from the way we represent it. He constantly entertains the possibility that our systems of thinking, our theories (whatever their object or domain of objects) could be illusory distortions of how things are in themselves. Contrary to Kant, though, he does not believe that we are necessarily closed off from cognition of things in themselves.

12 

On this distinction see Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 94–9. 13  Axel Hutter, Geschichtliche Vernunft.

Schelling (1775–1854)   93

5.2  The Basic Idea of a Philosophy of Nature One prominent way of looking at Schelling’s philosophy of nature, developed around the turn of the century, rightly sees it as being concerned with a unification of Kant and Spinoza. As a matter of fact, Schelling was keen to close the gap between “criticism” and “dogmatism,” as he labeled the two positions respectively in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism.14 In order to understand Schelling’s approach to the difference between the two positions, it is sufficient to understand “things in themselves” first as the way the world would have been had no creature ever existed capable of referring to how things were. The term “things in themselves” in this use denotes what Quentin Meillassoux has called the “ancestral”; that is, the world prior to the emergence of its thinking inhabitants.15 Against this background Schelling developed the wider concept of a “transcendental past”16—the way the world and our first-order reference to it (what he calls “the Ego”) would have been had no one ever referred to it. For Schelling, intentionality has structures it would have had anyway, had no one ever become aware of them and in this sense he is a more global realist than Kant or the Kantian variations contemporary Hegelians make out in Hegel. The world unobserved or not referred to is traditionally called “nature” and one can already see where dogmatism is heading: Dogmatism understands things in themselves as nature, and identifies ultimate reality with the (as of today still) counterfactual situation of the universe without any observers in it. “Criticism,” on the contrary, argues that things in themselves are not really things “out there,” or “ancestral nature,” but rather theoretical constructions, “limit concepts” in Kant’s sense. According to criticism, the very concept of a thing in itself belongs to higher-order philosophical theorizing and ought not to be regarded as an ontological commitment of epistemology, the theory of perception, or even our most general theory of truth-apt thought. Things in themselves are not contents to be referred to, they are not the objects of singular thoughts, but rather theoretical entities introduced in order to explain the potential difference between the way we generally represent things as being and how they are independently of our conditions of representing them. According to Schelling, both Spinoza and Kant ultimately oscillate between dogmatism and criticism. His interpretation of this oscillation as related to ancient Greek tragedy indicates that he regards both extremes as perennial.17 In particular, Kant has often been seen as oscillating between the view that things in themselves are full-fledged things with causal powers and the view that they are theoretical constructions (limit concepts) and therefore, concepts which do not genuinely refer to anything. Kant is indeed operating on two levels, given that he sometimes introduces things in themselves 14  Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in F. Marti tr. and ed., The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Essays (1794–1796) (London: Associated Presses, 1980), pp. 156–218. 15  Cf. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, tr. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008). 16  SW X, 93. 17  On this see Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

94   Markus Gabriel as posits in Quine’s sense18 and sometimes as first-order ontological commitments of his theory.19 Schelling’s philosophy of nature is a response to this conundrum. Instead of regarding dogmatism and criticism as eternally fixed positions, he changes the question. Whereas Kant argued that our conditions of referring to objects with truth-apt thoughts (what he calls “cognition (Erkenntnis)”) are in principle incompatible with cognition of things in themselves, Schelling tries to develop a theory of the transition of the unobserved world of nature into a world inhabited by creatures capable of referring to nature. In other words, he thinks of the things in themselves as a process of “phenomenalization.”20 This is intended by his famous allegory of nature opening its eyes in our cognition of nature, an idea recurring in Thomas Nagel’s heavily disputed Mind and Cosmos, which explicitly considers objective idealism in the sense of Schelling and Hegel as an option.21 Nagel’s metaphor of a “universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself”22 is the fundamental idea of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. It is important to note that in 1989 Hogrebe already convincingly argued that Schelling here only makes use of a weak anthropic principle, whereas Nagel seems to have a stronger reading that is ultimately much less convincing, as the immediate dismissal of Nagel’s Naturphilosophie has shown.23 The weak anthropic principle Schelling draws on only claims that nature (the domain of things in themselves prior to the existence of any creature capable of referring) is compatible with creatures referring to it, at least, to the extent to which such creatures arise in it (as they did). As Nagel rightly emphasizes, any scientific inquiry presupposes that nature is at least minimally intelligible, that the phenomena we observe are not completely and utterly random. According to Schelling, this minimal requirement of intelligibility is obviously met by nature. Otherwise, we could not have emerged as fairly successful referrers. However, this should not give us any reason to believe that this emergence is somehow necessitated by nature; it could well have been that nature had not met any standards of intelligibility. Here Schelling is in full agreement with contemporary metaphysical speculation in theoretical physics and in clear opposition to both Kant and Hegel: Whereas Kant believes that we cannot say anything with full-fledged content about nature in Schelling’s sense, Hegel believes that we have to say that nature would have had an intelligible structure even had no one ever been around to become aware of this structure. Notice that I explicitly reject the view that Schelling or Hegel ever defended a strong anthropic principle. There is no evidence that they take the existence of expressed rationality as a necessary outcome of the existence of anything worthy of being called “nature.” Contrary to many readings of German Idealism, it is far more plausible to 18 

Cf. W. v. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), pp. 21–5. On this see Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989); Markus Gabriel, An den Grenzen der Erkenntnistheorie—Die notwendige Endlichkeit des Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus (Freiburg/München: Alber, 2008); Markus Gabriel Die Erkenntnis der Welt. Eine Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie (Freiburg/München: Alber, 2013). 20  Cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Other Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 14. 21  Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), p. 17. 22  Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 85. 23  Cf. Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos, p. 101. 19 

Schelling (1775–1854)   95 read it as a quite modest project. On closer inspection, the label “idealism” does not even fit Schelling’s philosophy, unless one is willing to call the view that the observed universe has to be compatible with the existence of observers “objective idealism,” which is Schelling’s intended sense of this term. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is part of a twofold system. It is complemented by “transcendental idealism,” in his sense, where this term refers to the investigation of the necessary and universal structures of our reference to how things really are under the condition that creatures capable of reference exist. The philosophy of nature has a developmental structure: it begins with things in themselves, then develops the conditions for creatures that refer to them. If it were to be rewritten under contemporary conditions, it would contain a history of the universe from the Big Bang to merely geological times, to the emergence of complicated chemistry and the emergence of life, to the evolution of creatures sufficiently sophisticated to be aware of how their awareness fits into nature. There are good reasons why Haeckel considered Schelling (alongside Goethe) as an important forerunner of evolutionary theory in a letter to Darwin.24 Even though Schelling did not consider and would probably not have accepted the idea that the evolution of life forms is purely mechanical and proceeds by chance and mere probabilistic laws, his own thought about the overall evolution of thought within an epistemically “blind” universe can be made sense of in contemporary terms. However, Schelling is not a full-fledged naturalist or “dogmatist,” as he would say, for he accepts some version of transcendental idealism for our conditions of reference. He agrees that we have to be able to accommodate the different regions of nature into our way of referring to how things are. In principle, our ways of distinguishing between inanimate matter and fully teleological processes (such as human goal-directed action) must be compatible without deflating that distinction into the Kantian difference between knowing full well and merely believing in the possibility of objectively existing organisms in the mode of the “as if.”25 In other words, Schelling’s transcendental idealism consists in the fairly modest claim that we only have reasons to believe that some fundamental differences in types of natural kinds (chemical reactions as opposed to goal-directed organic processes or geological processes) actually match the way things are in themselves. This is his version of the view that our conditions of accessing how things are are ontologically met by how things are. This is why Schelling did not believe that his philosophy of nature would be a radical revision of his attempts in transcendental philosophy, but rather thought of both projects as complementary.

5.3 The Freedom Essay As I have argued extensively in Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift, any reading of the Freedom Essay should first note the structure of the text and determine its topic according to its official statements.26 This is not trivial given that even the custom of 24 

For a defense of Schelling as an actual forerunner of species evolution see R. J. Richards, Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution? (Forthcoming, 2013). 25  Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, tr. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), AA 09:93. 26  Markus Gabriel, Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2006).

96   Markus Gabriel abbreviating the title and referring to the text as the Freedom Essay obscures an important point: the book is not primarily about freedom, or human freedom, but about the essence of human freedom. It is most literally translated a set of Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Objects Related to It. Schelling explicitly claims that the “highest point of the investigation” is what he calls the “Ungrund,” which should be rendered in English as unground. In order to understand the function of this concept in the architecture of the theory espoused in the book, it is crucial to highlight a second, often neglected, fact. Schelling does not speak about “ground” and “existence” as of two metaphysical principles. Rather, he talks about “essence, insofar as it is the ground of existence” and “essence, insofar as it exists.”27 He presents this distinction as a central element of the subject he discusses and it has rightly been focused on by much of the literature. However, it has gone widely unnoticed that the essence here is the unground. The unground is the essence with two aspects, the unground as ground of existence and the unground as what exists. Given that the introduction of the Freedom Essay deals with the relation between predication and identity, what Schelling is really up to with his famous distinction and his concept of the unground can be translated into a theory of predication. If one takes the historical context into account, it becomes plausible that Schelling is responding to the question of how identity statements can be both non-contradictory and informative, a question posed by Leibniz and some Leibnizian theorists of predication (in particular Ploucquet) and debated in Tübingen during Schelling’s studies there.28 As Schelling repeatedly writes, to assert that A = B is to assert that there is some X which is both A and B. He thinks of A and B as aspects under which we can refer to X.29 Contrary to contemporary theoretical decisions, Schelling believes that there is a uniform basic theory of predication that assimilates atomic propositions to identity statements in the following sense. For Schelling, to assert that Solon is wise means to assert that there is some X that is both Solon and wise. To assert that Solon is identical with one of the Seven Sages or that Solon the Statesman is Solon the Sage is also to assert that there is some X that is both Solon and one of the Seven Sages or that there is some X that is both Solon the Statesman and Solon the Sage. The identity theory of predication, thus, does not hold that the copula means “is identical with.” Of course, Schelling did not believe that the assertion that the street is wet means “the street is identical with wet.” But he would argue that the assertion that the street is wet can be analyzed as “there is an X which is both the street and wet.” This provides him with an overall pattern of predication. The X of predication is what he calls “the unground.” It is an “unground” precisely insofar as its nature is not settled in advance. Before it is settled that X is both A and B, it is not necessarily determined what X is. For some x’s, which are candidates for the universal X of predication, it is true that they are produced or created by the predication. These x’s are the objects of freedom (or actions) mentioned in the title of the book. If I make it true that I danced by dancing, then there is something which is both me and dancing. The something that I am sometimes is me 27 

SW VII, 357. On these connections see first and foremost Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus, pp. 375–414. 29  On this see in particular Wolfram Hogrebe, Die Wirklichkeit des Denkens. Vorträge der Gadamer-Professur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007). 28 

Schelling (1775–1854)   97 dancing, a fact which only obtains because I sometimes make it true that I am dancing. On the contrary, if I assert that Hesperus is Phosphorus, than the x that is both Hesperus and Phosphorus is not embedded in facts produced by the assertion. Schelling thinks of freedom in terms of performances: freedom is our capacity to produce objects by so much as stating their existence, as when we assert that we just asserted something, which produces an assertion as an object of investigation. But the unground itself, the universal X, is neither determined to be paradigmatically filled in by natural objects nor by objects of freedom (like successfully executed actions, institutions, or self-referential assertions). It is maximally topic-neutral:  it stands for whatever can be the case and make a statement about it true. Against this background, Schelling calls it the “essence” for the simple reason that the actual truth-value of a statement is essential for the statement both insofar as it is true and insofar as the truth-value is tied to an actual truth-maker: truth settles the statement’s nature. If I assert that Solon is wise and I am wrong, then my mental state was that of an error, whereas I might assert that Solon is wise and be right about this in a relevant way so as to count as knowing that Solon is wise. If I am in error I am in an essentially different state than if I know something. The truth-value is the essence of predication. We assert something in the form of predication with the aim of making true statements. The difference between the unground as ground of existence and the unground as what exists can also be reconstructed along the lines of such a minimal theory of predication. Let us come back to “Solon is wise.” In this case, the x insofar as it is Solon is the ground which can unify various properties: Solon essentially can be wise, hairy, funny, witty, and small. The ground of existence corresponds to the subject-position in traditional logic with the addition that we think of the subject as capable of also having other properties not articulated in an atomic proposition articulating merely one of them. Now Solon considered as a bare particular, as blank thisness, is not determined enough to be the ground of anything. He already has to have some property that characterizes him as this something rather than something else. This can be called the essence as what exists: Solon exists as a Sage. What exists over there is a Sage, and the Sage is Solon. No actual thisness without suchness. What Schelling is claiming is that X designates anything within the domain of truth-makers, and every truth about any particular truth-maker comes out as having the form: ground exists as Y. For example, Solon exists as a Sage. Given that we can always prefix any such minimal truth with an existential quantifier, Schelling suggests that we understand “Solon exists as a sage” as “Among all the X there is some x which is both Solon and a sage.” Solon’s being a Sage is Solon’s existence: he exists as a Sage. The unground is topic-neutral and universal. If we only refer to there being all the truth-makers and call this “X,” we do not acquire any particular information about how things are. Reference to the unground only allows us to claim that there is something or other, but we do not thereby know what it is. This is why Schelling designates the unground in the text by a mere dash and writes: “— how shall we designate it?” The “it” refers to the dash and the designation Schelling offers is “unground.” The unground is the essence of predication, and therefore of everything we can think of as existing in such a way that it has some properties by which it is distinguished from something else. At this point, it becomes evident that the theory of predication is developed at the service of Schelling’s ontology. The unground is introduced to explain how statements can be either right or

98   Markus Gabriel wrong. If they are wrong, there is no x which belongs to X. Wrong statements miss the essence. There is nothing that is the way the statements represent it as being (which is not to deny that some elements of a wrong statement nevertheless refer to some existing object). One can call this whole stretch of reasoning an “ontology of predication.” Schelling’s insistence on the unground as the “highest point of the investigation” is just his assertion that all truth-apt statements are fallible. It is a rejection of any form of idealism that identifies everything there is with something produced by stating its being there. The unground, in other words, is an essential element in Schelling’s ontological realism. Now, Schelling refers to his position explicitly as a combination of idealism and realism, a “Real-Idealismus.”30 On my reading, what he is thereby maintaining is again by and large straightforward. All he is saying is that there are some objects that are products of freedom. These are the objects from the very title of the book: the objects related to the essence of human freedom. Human freedom for Schelling is defined by its creativity. It consists in the fact that we can make something the case by doing something. The facts we thereby create would not have existed had no one at least had a concept of freedom. So, independently of the question of determinism, Schelling maintains that we at least have the concept of freedom. We are at least under the impression that there are contingent paths of action and that we can choose which facts to create and which facts to leave out of existence. He opens the main body of the text with reference to just that impression, which he calls “the fact of freedom”31 and adds that it first comes in the form of a “feeling.”32 We are at least under the impression of freedom. What Schelling sets out to do is to describe the ontological conditions of the possibility of there really being freedom. In other words, he tries to reconcile system (= the ontology) and freedom (= our feeling of the fact of freedom). In my reading, the whole argument is a thought experiment spelling out the structure of how the relation between reality and its appearance while thinking about it could fit together in such a way as to give room for actual freedom.33 Let me spell this out in more detail so that the structure of the text becomes more transparent. Many readings of the freedom parts of the Freedom Essay have focused on the distinction between the possibility and the actuality of freedom. In reconstructing this distinction, the crucial point is often missed that freedom for Schelling is not primarily a matter of action in the sense of carrying out an intention through bodily movement or of committing to a norm. For Schelling, to be free is neither the capacity to choose between a number of possible courses of action nor the submission to a universal norm in such a manner that we are capable of having desire-independent reasons for action (where the latter is arguably the main idea of Kant’s conception of freedom). Like Fichte and Hegel, Schelling is working on a unified account of reason that allows for a concept of reason that ascribes all essential properties of reason to all its apparently different exercises. Practical reason and theoretical reason should have something in common, namely reason. If it turns out that reason is essentially and inextricably bound to freedom, there must be theoretical freedom too. And here Schelling adds that the theory of freedom is necessarily developed by a free agent, whom I call “the theory agent.”34 The theory agent has to be free in conceiving of the theory, she must be able

30 

31  SW VII, 336. 32  SW VII, 336. Cf. SW III, 165; SW X, 107. I call this theory-design “transcendental ontology” in Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology. 34  Cf. Markus Gabriel, Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift. 33 

Schelling (1775–1854)   99 to get freedom right or wrong. Thus, conceiving of the relationship between freedom and determinism in a theory which entertains the possibility of freedom is already an actual exercise of freedom: if the theory agent were determined in his or her theory choices, if the transition from one proposition to the next and the connection between the propositions in terms of valid inferences were forced on the agent, he or she would not meet the minimal requirement for a theory defended as a result of insight, namely that it can be true or false. Of course, one might object that theoretical freedom could just be another illusion, that our theories are caused by our neurochemically hardwired habits of “inferring.” How do we know that it is not the case that all theories are habits accepted by a number of equally hardwired other believers in the theory? Schelling’s answer to this is straightforward: in such a radically deterministic system the concept of truth or falsity would disappear. Whatever the truth-value of the theory, the theory could not be changed in accordance with a further insight into its truth-value. There would be no reason whatsoever to presuppose that there is rational theory change rather than a random reconfiguration of the elements of the deterministic system sometimes generating the illusion of self-conscious responsibility for accepting this rather than that proposition of the chain of “reasoning.” Forms of skepticism about practical reason supported by determinism are still easier to swallow than skepticism about theoretical reason. But if they have the same root, this difference in degree is the real illusion: to accept that one has no freedom in action is to accept that one has no freedom in theory—after all, developing a theory is just another kind of action. Therefore, there cannot be any reason speaking for the denial of rationality as a whole in favor of the idea that there are only hardwired transitions from one occurring thought to the next, where the transition is never motivated by an insight into truth so that one chooses to exchange a false (but potentially true) for an actually true proposition in one’s theory.35 If we are even so much as capable of grasping the sense in which our feeling of freedom could indicate the fact of freedom, we can thereby come to know that we are actually free in this very conception. Schelling thus moves from the possibility of practical freedom via the actuality of theoretical freedom to the actuality of practical freedom. The argument can thus be summed up as follows. We have an intuitive conception of practical freedom (the feeling of the fact of freedom):

1. If we compare this feeling with arguments speaking in favor of determinism, we are comparing freedom and a deterministic system within a theory. 2. The theory can be right or wrong. 3. If we develop a theory that can be right or wrong, we are acting. 4. This action cannot be hardwired, for any hardwired preference for some proposition or other cannot be arrived at via reasoning. 5. Our concept of reasoning is a concept of freedom: we could always have believed a true instead of a false proposition (or the other way around). 6. If we reason at all, we are therefore free. 7. We reason in arguing for or against determinism.

35  For a similar argument see Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Mind and Cosmos.

100   Markus Gabriel 8. We are therefore free in developing a theory. 9. But developing a theory is an action. 10. Therefore, we are actually practically free, which we can discover by considering the negation of practical freedom in arguments speaking against it and in favor of determinism. For Schelling, there is further important semantic evidence for theoretical freedom. We draw a distinction between an exercise of theoretical reason (reasoning) and an obsessive repetition of some occurring thought. The very distinction between reasoning and madness is therefore crucial throughout Schelling’s work.36 “Madness” for Schelling is a necessary predecessor of reasoning which he sometimes calls “understanding.” When he notoriously writes in his Stuttgart Private Lectures that “understanding is regulated madness (Verstand ist geregelter Wahnsinn),”37 he is not claiming that reason and madness are fundamentally indistinguishable. All he is saying is that there is a history of humanity within which reason was forged, and as such this prehistoric stretch of the evolution of historical human beings cannot have exhibited reason as we associate it with human beings today. Schelling accepts that there is a genealogy of reason which is not itself reasonable or even teleologically related to full-fledged reason, but rejects the further idea that this should undermine our commitment to reason and the associated freedom: just because reason was forged in a pre-rational process, there is no reason to assume that it does not exist now. The fact that rationality arises from madness does not make rationality mad, nor does it make madness rational. According to this reading of the arguments surrounding the concept of human freedom in the Freedom Essay, the discussion of “good” and “evil” turns out to be grounded in a perspective beyond moral good and evil. This is more perspicuous if one looks at the widely neglected concept of the good in the Freedom Essay, which sheds light on the

36  For this reason Schelling has often been read as a predecessor of Freud, which is in part correct. See Odo Marquard, “Schelling—Zeitgenosse incognito,” in H. M. Baumgartner, ed., Schelling. Einführung in seine Philosophie (München: Alber, 1975), pp. 9–26; H. M. Baumgartner, ed., Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Verlag für Philosophie Dinter, 1987); Elke Völmicke, Das Unbewußte im Deutschen Idealismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder and The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud, and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Freud himself explicitly refers to Schelling, most famously in his essay on “The Uncanny,” in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, tr. D. McLintock (London: Penguin Classics, 2003). It should be noted, however, that Freud himself has a strong tendency to think of reasoning itself as a deterministic system and even associates philosophical systems with forms of neurosis and psychosis. Schelling’s point, though, is that reason is precisely not mad in the sense of an obsessive repetition of some occurring thought pattern. He considers madness as a contrast necessary to acquire the full concept of reason. All he is committing to is that creatures capable of reasoning are essentially creatures capable of madness, but that there is no such thing as a full-blown madness of reason. For further discussion of this point see Markus Gabriel, “Autonomie, Normativität und das Problem des Scheiterns der Subjektivität,” in J. Nida-Rümelin and E. Özmen eds., Welt der Gründe. Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie 4 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012), pp. 607–24. 37  F.W.J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Private Lectures,” in T. Pfau, tr. and ed., Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); SW VII, 470.

Schelling (1775–1854)   101 concept of evil. In a decisive passage of the text, Schelling brings the concepts of good and evil together and defines them via the concepts of truth and being (where “being” refers to being in the sense of factual being or being so): We have seen how, through false imagining and cognition that orients itself according to what does not have Being, the human spirit opens itself to the spirit of lies and falsehood and, fascinated by the latter, soon loses its initial freedom. It follows from this that, by contrast, the true good could be effected only through a divine magic, namely through the immediate presence of what has Being in consciousness and cognition. An arbitrary good [willkürliches Gutes] is as impossible as an arbitrary evil [willkürliches Böses].38

“Willkür” here refers to the indeterminate starting point of freedom, the “capacity of good and evil”39. Given the topic-neutrality of reason there is always a corresponding “capacity of truth and falsity” or of “knowledge and error” respectively. This allows Schelling to speak of the true good and to associate good and evil with forms of cognition. Evil, then, is the result of lie and error, it results from turning away from an insight available to the evil person, whereas the good corresponds to the resolution to be committed to rational theory change. By this I mean the following quite simple thought: evil here is not a name for the property of an action, but rather for the structure of a sustained overall course of action. Evil resists changes according to rational theory, it sticks to its premises no matter what. Good, on the contrary, is the openness for rational theory change. Before we move to a discussion of negative and positive philosophy, which further develops the elements already laid out in the Freedom Essay, we should take a closer look at the idea of an evil and a good overall course of action. We know that Schelling is thinking about action in the overall context of both an ontology of predication and a topic-neutral unified concept of reason. Actions as much as any other thing or event exist. Reference to them has to be covered by the ontology of predication. It is essential for predication that what is predicated can be right or wrong: If X as ground does not correspond to X as what exists, or if X as what exists does not correspond to X as ground, a predication is wrongly applied and a truth-apt thought accepting the predication as true (a judgment) accordingly amounts to error. So, if either Solon is not wise or the wise thing over there is not Solon, the judgment “Solon is wise” turns out to be false.40 An evil course of action is guided by a wrong idea as to how things are. Trivially, it is guided either by ignorance about what the right thing to do would be, or by error about what the good thing to do is. If the agent persists in the evil course of action despite better knowledge, the evil course of action is radically evil in Schelling’s sense. To be radically evil is thus to carry through an evil course of action despite better knowledge, that is, to actively resist rational theory change. In concluding this overall presentation of the Freedom Essay, it might be helpful to comment upon the highly unusual form of presentation of the text itself. One of the possible reasons why Schelling is not considered a prominent nineteenth century philosopher in contemporary debates lies in the form of presentation of his arguments. Even though in reality Hegel’s writing makes at least as much use of complicated and 38 

39  SW VII, 352. SW VII, 391. To be slightly more precise, one of course has to admit the further option that there is no X which is either Solon or wise, so there are cases of error where nothing is Solon or wise. 40 

102   Markus Gabriel unusual metaphors as Schelling’s, a widespread complaint states that the Freedom Essay reads like a piece of fully irrational or oracular discourse, a complaint epitomized by Heinrich Heine’s dictum:  “Once the cobbler Jacob Böhme talked like a philosopher; now the philosopher Schelling talks like a cobbler.”41 This passage is partially responsible for the historical dismissal of Schelling, as Heine goes on to claim that Schelling has been surpassed by Hegel and turned into a mere predecessor of Hegelianism. However, Schelling gives an interesting justification of the mode of presentation of the arguments in the text towards the end of the text in a footnote where he opposes Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of romantic aestheticism: The author has never wished through the founding of a sect to take away from others and, least of all, from himself the freedom of investigation in which he has declared himself still engaged and probably will always declare himself engaged. In the future, he will also maintain the course that he has taken in the present treatise where, even if the external form of a dialogue is lacking, everything arises as a sort of dialogue. Many things here could have been more sharply defined and treated less casually, many protected more explicitly from misinterpretation. The author has refrained from doing so partly on purpose. Whoever will and cannot accept it from him thus, should accept nothing from him at all and seek other sources.42

In this passage I would like to highlight the phrase “the freedom of investigation,” which is textual evidence for the transcendental reading defended in this section of the chapter. The investigation into the essence of human freedom presupposes the freedom of that very investigation. In addition to this, Schelling explicitly claims here that there is a threshold where making it explicit no longer leaves room for the recipient’s freedom of investigation and freedom of understanding. Schelling’s method is dialogical in that he is writing in full awareness of the fallibility of his claims and the impossibility of making a philosophical point utterly immune to error or misunderstanding. Of course, this might cause problems for his position: if the argument that the determinist cannot make sense of a central condition of theory-building (namely theoretical freedom) could itself prove to be wrong, then determinism could after all be right. This seems to undermine the force of transcendental arguments whose modality usually is a priori necessity. Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to assess the argumentation of the Freedom Essay in detail, but only to lay out the rational structure behind the appearance of a romantic fragment. One way of reconstructing the further development of the middle period would precisely be to see Schelling as responding to the objection just formulated. In any event, Schelling participates as much in the project of giving a unified theory of rationality as Fichte, Hegel, and other first-generation Post-Kantians.

41 

English quote from Emil L. Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,” in J.W. Burbidge, ed., The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 209, n. 3. Original quote in Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, in: Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig: Insel, 1910–15), Vol. 5, 5:294. 42  F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. and introduction J. Love (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 71–2; SW VII, 410–11.

Schelling (1775–1854)   103

5.4  Negative and Positive Philosophy Schelling’s so-called late philosophy is mostly discussed in terms of its distinction between negative and positive philosophy, although the rationale behind this distinction can actually be traced through all phases of his thinking. Nevertheless, the distinction assumes center stage in his later philosophy, which is roughly his work after The Ages of the World. There is a long controversy over the nature of this distinction and its historical origins; however, the traditional interpretations can largely be divided into two camps. One sees Schelling as breaking with the Kantian and Post-Kantian consensus that reason should be understood as a universal form of self-determining or autonomous capacity and argues that Schelling is moving beyond idealism in a direction close to something like a Heideggerian historicity of being or to some version of existentialism.43 The other camp sees Schelling as still engaging in the project of completing the Post-Kantian project of a full-fledged unification of reason, an idea epitomized by the title of Walter Schulz’ book Schelling’s Late Philosophy as the Completion of German Idealism.44 In my The Man in Myth I have argued that Schelling’s late philosophy is a peculiar and irreducible project that combines some of the elements traditional interpreters wanted to isolate from it.45 In order to grasp what is at stake in this debate, it is illuminating to take a closer look at the concept of negative philosophy and then reconstruct where Schelling locates its shortcomings. Famously, Schelling associates negative philosophy with Hegel, but also with Kant’s critical philosophy. Negative philosophy is first and foremost the attempt to achieve an insight into the most universal structure of how things appear to pure thought or reason alone. Traditionally, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel, this aim is supposed to be realizable by inspecting the fundamental structure of what it is for objects to be determined as this rather than that. Schelling himself is working in this tradition with his ontology of predication, which is a contribution to the idea that there is a “blueprint of being”46 or a “figure of being”47 that serves as a kind of transcendental, that is, universal and necessary matrix. Logic and ontology work together tracing the minimal conditions for something being a certain way and for it being disclosed to thinking that it is this way. Schelling’s later version of negative philosophy comes in the form of his theory of potencies.48 The basic idea behind the theory of potencies can be reconstructed as follows. If something is some way or other, we first need to assume that there is something rather than nothing. Whatever there is, it first has to exist and that assumption of existence prior to any determination of that existence is what Schelling calls the first potency. The first potency is “pure could without any being (reines Können ohne alles Seyn).”49 What Schelling has in mind here is the notion that the starting point of any ontology is the idea that there is something rather than nothing, an idea independent from the nature of this 43  Cf. Karl Jaspers, Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis; Jürgen Habermas, Das Absolute und die Geschichte; Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. 44  Cf. Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus. 45  Cf. Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos. 46  SW XI, 291. 47  SW XI, 313. 48  On this see Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Markus Gabriel, Der Mensch im Mythos. 49  SW XI, 318.

104   Markus Gabriel very something. All we know is that there is something in the first place and that it could be anything—it is pure possibility in the sense that it could be anything. The second potency, on the contrary, is the idea of a fixed nature, it is “pure being without any could.”50 This again is surprisingly simple to understand. It just means that we will ascribe some overall property to whatever exists and that that property determines it as being some way or other. As Schelling also writes, the first potency is the logical subject of the ontological matrix of truth-apt judgment, whereas the second potency is its predicate. Finally, the third potency consists in bringing the first and second potencies together. It corresponds to the full-fledged judgment that what really exists is this way rather than another way. However, and this is one aspect of the shortcoming of any negative philosophy, the truth-value of the judgment is not identical with its projection of truth conditions. In other words, Schelling insists that there are truth-makers we can only know about by advancing defeasible claims. For him this point is so general that it also applies to transcendental thinking. In order to illustrate this abstract scheme, let us go back to Solon the Sage. The atomic judgment that asserts that Solon is wise presupposes that there is something rather than nothing. Like Frege, Schelling here thinks of existence as “the most natural presupposition (selbstverständlichste Voraussetzung)”51 of any judgment. That there is something that could be both Solon and wise is a presupposition of the judgment. In its utmost generality, the view that there is something rather than nothing ultimately only commits one to there being something which could be anything, be it Solon, wise, or what have you. If Solon is indeed wise then this tells us something about how things really are. Things are determined as being a certain way, including Solon being wise. On Schelling’s view, then, any true judgment is a partial insight into how things really are, and every fact corresponding to such an insight is a further determination of the fact that there is something rather than nothing. There is Solon the Sage, Zion the mountain, Aristotle the writer, and the red square in front of me. In all these cases there is something that is some way. Schelling takes from this the idea of an ultimate truth-maker, which is also the false-maker of all false judgments. This ultimate truth-maker is what he calls “unprethinkable being.” Unprethinkable being in this context is just the generic name for everything which is the case anyway and which makes it the case that there is something rather than nothing. In a true judgment, we refer to unprethinkable being under some description, such as Solon the wise or the red square; for Schelling, these descriptions can always be framed in terms of the structure of a categorical judgment: S is P. Judgments are descriptions of how things really are. Yet, they can be either right or wrong, and this is possible because they are capable of missing their ultimate truth-condition, unprethinkable being. Unprethinkable being is unprethinkable in the sense that it is not produced by propositional thought, but is a condition for propositional thought being what it is, namely true or false. All that Schelling is claiming here is that not all truth-conditions for judgments are produced by these very judgments. There is always a potential gap between how things really are and how we present them as being.

50 

SW XI, 318. Gottlob Frege, “Dialogue with Puenjer on Existence,” in P. Long and R. White tr., Posthumous Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 60. Translation slightly altered. 51 

Schelling (1775–1854)   105 Contrary to a widespread opinion, unprethinkable being is not the essence of positive philosophy. The concept is introduced in negative philosophy, that is, in the context of the ontology of predication. What is crucial is that from the standpoint of the ontology of predication, there has to be a uniform treatment of all objects insofar as they can become the content of truth-apt thought. For negative philosophy, an action is as much an object as a cat, a mountain or a number. In contrast to this standard interpretation of positive philosophy, Schelling defends a positive philosophy where the domain of human action can be regarded as the historical transformation of unprethinkable being into a different domain, a domain of facts that only obtain because we have produced them. Human action (which includes human theory-building) “elevates”52 unprethinkable being by making it increasingly transparent as we produce true assertions about what used to go unnoticed. In order to defend the view that the history of human awareness of how things are is progressive, that it is a constant acquisition of knowledge as to how things really are and in this sense transforms unprethinkable being into being thought, it is not sufficient to grasp the concept of truth-conditions in general. Rather, it is necessary to actually inspect the history of human awareness of how things are, what Schelling calls a “history of self-consciousness.” This history of self-consciousness seems to be the history of unprethinkable being becoming more and more transparent to thought. Yet, given the fallibility of judgment, we cannot claim a priori, from the standpoint of ontology, that there is such a progress. For this reason, it is mandatory to write a philosophy of history that conceives of philosophy itself as a historical activity, an activity progressing with the broadest shape of human awareness, with our world-pictures. Schelling sets out to write this history in his positive philosophy, which has two parts, the Philosophy of Mythology and the Philosophy of Revelation. The first part deals with the past, with the development of human awareness up to the point of the epoch of the Roman Empire, whereas the second is concerned with the hope that this development indeed follows the path of a constant recovery of unprethinkable being up to modernity. However, any reconstruction of the details of positive philosophy goes beyond the scope of this article. What is crucial about the very distinction between negative and positive philosophy is that Schelling extends the notion of realism and argues that the way things turn out to be really or actually can change our conception of how to think about them. Positive philosophy is a form of historicism guided by the idea of an overall transcendental matrix, which, however, is still subject to possible change. This feature of Schelling’s project was attractive to the very early Habermas and the later Heidegger, among other people, because it suggests a philosophy of history breaking free from the presupposition that the conditions of predication define the limits of the thinkable or even of the actual.

Bibliography Beach, E.  A., 1994. The Potencies of God(s):  Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Blumenberg, H., 2001. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

52 

Cf. SW XI, 389, where Schelling speaks of “elevation to selfhood (Erhöhung in Selbstheit).”

106   Markus Gabriel Brandom, R.  B., 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead:  Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Cassirer, E., 1953–96. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Darwall, S. L., 2009. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fackenheim, E., 1996. “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,” in J.W. Burbidge ed. 1996. The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ffytche, M., 2012. The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud, and the Birth of the Modern Psyche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frank, M., 1992. Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik. München: Fink. Frank, M., 2007. Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Frege, G., 1979. “Dialogue with Puenjer on Existence,” in P. Long and R. White tr. 1979. Posthumous Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 52–67. Freud, S., 2003. The Uncanny. Tr. D. McLintock. London: Penguin Classics. Gabriel, M., 2006. Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift. Bonn:  Bonn University Press. Gabriel, M., 2006. Der Mensch im Mythos. Untersuchungen über Ontotheologie, Anthropologie und Selbstbewußtseinsgeschichte in Schellings “Philosophie der Mythologie”. Berlin/ New York, NY: De Gruyter. Gabriel, M., 2008. An den Grenzen der Erkenntnistheorie—Die notwendige Endlichkeit des Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus. Freiburg/München: Alber. Gabriel, M., 2011. Transcendental Ontology:  Essays in German Idealism. New  York, NY/ London: Continuum. Gabriel, M., 2012. “Autonomie, Normativität und das Problem des Scheiterns der Subjektivität,” in J. Nida-Rümelin and E. Özmen eds. 2012. Welt der Gründe. Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie 4 (2012). Hamburg: Meiner, pp. 607–24. Gabriel, M., 2013. Die Erkenntnis der Welt. Eine Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie. Freiburg/München: Alber. Gabriel, M. and Žižek, S., 2009. Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. London/New York, NY: Continuum. Habermas, J., 1954. Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken. Bonn: Bouvier. Hamilton Grant, I., 2006. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London/New  York, NY: Continuum. Hegel, G. W. F. 1990. Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–26, Volume III:  Medieval and Modern Philosophy. Tr. R. F.  Brown and J. M.  Stewart. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Heine, H., 1910. “Die romantische Schule,” in Sämmtliche Werke. Leipzig: Insel (1910–15), Vol. 5. Hogrebe, W., 1989. Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter.” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hogrebe, W., 2007. Die Wirklichkeit des Denkens. Vorträge der Gadamer-Professur. Heidelberg: Winter. Hühn, L., 1994. Fiche und Schelling oder: Über die Grenze menschlichen Wissens. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Hutter, A., 1996. Geschichtliche Vernunft. Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Schelling (1775–1854)   107 Jaspers, K., 1955. Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis. München: Piper. Kant, I., 1992. Lectures on Logic. Tr. J. M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marquard, O., 1975. “Schelling - Zeitgenosse inkognito,” in H. M. Baumgartner ed. 1975. Schelling: Einführung in seine Philosophie. München: Alber, pp. 9–26. Marquard, O., 1987. Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse. Köln: Verlag für Philosophie Dinter. Meillassoux, Q, 2008. After finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Tr. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum. Nagel, T., 2003. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T., 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neuhouser, F., 1990. Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prauss, G., 1989. Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. Bonn: Bouvier. Quine, W. v. O., 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Richards, R. J., 2013. Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution? [Forthcoming] Schelling, F. W. J., 1980. “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in F. Marti tr. and ed. The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Essays (1794–1796). London: Associated Presses, pp. 156–218. Schelling, F. W. J., 1994. “Stuttgart Private Lectures,” in T. Pfau tr. and ed. 1994. Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schelling, F. W. J., 2006. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Tr. and introduction J. Love. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schulz, W., 1995. Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Habilitationsschrift. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Szondi, P., 2002. An Essay on the Tragic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tilliette, X., 1999. Schelling. Biographie. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Völmicke, E., 2005. Das Unbewußte im Deutschen Idealismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Žižek, S., 1996. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Other Matters. London: Verso. Žižek, S., 1997. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Wittgenstein, L., 1969. On Certainty. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Chapter 6

Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Sebastian Gardner 6.1 Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer occupies a central position in the narrative of nineteenth-century philosophy: though first and foremost an idealist, Schopenhauer belongs also to its naturalistic current, and with regard to many other central tendencies of the age—including the turn towards the practical, at the expense of the early modern image of man as reality-reflecting reason, the elevation of art to a position of near parity with philosophy, and the exploration of proxies for traditional religion—Schopenhauer again occupies a pivotal role; in a way that deserves to be found puzzling, Schopenhauer provides the key connecting link between Kant and Nietzsche.1 My aim here is to consider Schopenhauer’s philosophy from the perspective of German Idealism, an approach which, I  will try to 1  The main broad feature of nineteenth-century thought not exhibited by Schopenhauer—and which he in fact opposes vigorously—is its historical turn: see The World as Will and Representation [1st edn. 1819; 2nd edn., revised and enlarged, 2 volumes, 1844], 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 273–4. Further references to this work are abbreviated WWR, followed by volume and page number. References to other writings of Schopenhauer’s are given by the following abbreviations and are to the editions cited here:

BM

Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals [1840], in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). FR On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason [1st edn. 1813, 2nd edn. 1847], 2nd edn. trans. E. F. J. Payne (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1974). FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will [1839], in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). MREM Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 1 (New York: Berg, 1988). MRCD Manuscript Remains:  Critical Debates (1809–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F.  J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 2 (New York: Berg, 1988). PP Parerga and Paralipomena:  Short Philosophical Essays [1851], 2  vols., trans. E. F.  J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). VgP Vorlesung über die gesammte Philosophie d.i. Die Lehre vom Wesen der Welt und von dem menschlichen Geiste. In vier Theilen. Erster Theil: Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens, in Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens. Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlaß [1820], hrsg. u. eingeleitet von Volker Spierling (München: Piper, 1986).

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   109 show, takes us to the heart of his project and allows us to understand how a philosopher only one step removed from the philosophy of the Enlightenment could provide crucial impetus to late modern anti-rationalism. Some preliminary remarks are needed concerning this contextualization. Schope­ nhauer’s intention was not of course to provide simply a critique of German Idealism, but rather to present a self-standing, independently intelligible system, the grounds of which are contained in basic facts of consciousness and accessible to anyone who is able and willing to reflect on these in the unobscured light of Kant’s first Critique. Nor again is Schopenhauer’s target—the world-view he intends his system to confute—identified narrowly with the positions of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel: it comprises, much more broadly, the dominant tendency operative within all the major schools of Western philosophy, namely, their directedness towards an optimistic solution to the riddle of the existence of the world. It is possible, therefore, to detach Schopenhauer’s philosophy from all consideration of German Idealism, or to consider it, as much commentary does, only in relation to Kant and Nietzsche, but there are sound reasons for instead understanding his system abreactively—as in the first instance an attempt to simultaneously undermine, appropriate, and recast the legacy of German Idealism. It is a matter of historical record that Schopenhauer in the earliest years of his philosophical formation had extensive exposure to the lectures and writings of Fichte and Schelling, with whom he engages more closely in his early notebooks than with any other figures in the history of philosophy with the exception of Kant.2 Approaching Schopenhauer with this in mind allows better sense to be made of Schopenhauer’s ideas than can be achieved simply by placing them directly alongside Kant’s, Schopenhauer’s departures from whom often seem oddly under-motivated:3 Schopenhauer’s return to Kant is a return from German Idealism, conducted in light of its misconstrual (as he perceives it) of Kant’s thought. It is of course in relation to Kant alone that Schopenhauer asks for his system to be considered, but we can understand without difficulty the reasons why Schopenhauer would have wished to write German Idealism out of his philosophical ancestry.4 German Idealism represents for Schopenhauer the culmination of the optimistic tendency of Western philosophy and theology, which it equips with the most advanced modern articulation,5 its distinctive historical position consisting WN

On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroborations from the Empirical Sciences that the Author’s Philosophy has Received Since its First Appearance [1836], ed. David E. Cartwright, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1991).

2  On Schopenhauer’s early years, see Arthur Hübscher, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in its Intellectual Context: Thinker against the Tide, trans. Joachim T. Baer and David E. Cartwright (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1989), Chs. 5–6, and David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ch. 4. 3  Christopher Janaway, in Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 141–2, similarly affirms the need to set Schopenhauer in historical context in order to understand his departures from Kant. For analyses of Schopenhauer’s epistemology and metaphysics, see, in addition to Janaway, Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987) and Schopenhauer (London: Routledge, 2005), and John E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4  As he does explicitly at WWR I, 416, and PP I, 132. 5  WWR II, 644–5: all German Idealism is Spinozistic, and therefore optimistic.

110   Sebastian Gardner in its having recognized the profound and original advance made by Critical philosophy yet perversely refused to grasp its anti-optimistic vector.6 Finally, Schopenhauer’s central metaphysical claims allow themselves to be understood as negations of key claims in German Idealism. Schopenhauer’s philosophy represents, I  therefore suggest, the result of an attempt to as it were re-run the post-Kantian development—the attempt beginning in the 1790s to fix Kant’s problems—on the basis of a rejection of two crucial assumptions of Fichte and Schelling. The first of these is their reaffirmation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), to which they grant unrestricted scope and authority. The second concerns the value of our existence and that of the world, which is held, following Kant, to be secured by the moral Fact of Reason, meaning that value in general is grounded on freedom and enters the world primordially through the exercise of pure practical reason. On the basis of his controversion of these two fundamental assumptions, Schopenhauer inverts the significance of the concepts which he, completing his own extension of Kant’s philosophy, borrows from Fichte and Schelling. The net result is a system which has much of the formal structure and outward appearance of the German Idealist systems but a directly contrary import. Schopenhauer does not quite affirm the thoroughly disenchanted view of the world that the German Idealists attempted to show need not be accepted as the price of modernity, but the residue of enchantment which he allows to continue to attach to our existence is relocated outside the objectual world, in the form of its negation: the world itself inherits the ‘nothingness’, the ‘lack of an ultimate purpose or object’ and ‘absence of all aim’, of its metaphysical ground.7 Though Schopenhauer officially repudiates the Spinozistic nihilism that F. H. Jacobi warns of as the inevitable upshot of Kantianism8—on the somewhat thin basis that his doctrine of the negation of the world endows it with (inverted) moral-metaphysical significance9—his proximity to it can hardly be exaggerated: Schopenhauer reaffirms Spinoza’s anti-theism, determinism, materialist tendency, naturalistic view of human motivation, and reductionist account of value.

6.2  Schopenhauer’s Strategy 6.2.1  Contraction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason The first part of Schopenhauer’s strategy is presented in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, his first publication and a work to which he frequently refers back, declaring its conclusions to be presupposed by the argument of WWR.10 6 See MREM, 13: Kant exposed the contradictions in the lie which is life. 7 

WWR I, 149, 164. The ‘notion that the world has merely a physical, and no moral, significance is the most deplorable error that has sprung from the greatest perversity of mind’ (PP II, 102). Schopenhauer distinguishes his position from the ‘Neo-Spinozism’ described by Jacobi at WWR II, 645–6. 9  See Schopenhauer’s claim to have solved the age-old problem of demonstrating ‘a moral world-order as the basis of the physical’, WWR II, 590–1. 10  For example, WWR I, xiv. 8 

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   111 Fourfold Root presents itself in the first instance as a historical review conjoined with a systematic analysis of PSR, but it is clear from the outset that it is not intended as a neutral account of the different ways in which PSR has been invoked or may be understood. The work’s chief concern is to show, negatively, that confusions of different senses of ground or reason (Grund) have played a decisive role in metaphysical reasoning, and, positively, to offer a radically original, minimal account of the principle’s content.11 Schopenhauer identifies PSR with the conjunction of four principles: (i) the law of causality, requiring changes in real objects to have efficient causes; (ii) the condition on true judgement, that it has a ground outside itself; (iii) the mutual determination of all parts of space and time; and (iv) the law of motivation governing acts of will. Characteristically metaphysicians have confused the first two, especially in proofs of God’s existence, reflecting their illicit conviction that the order of things is in essence that of thought.12 The full force of Schopenhauer’s devaluation of PSR becomes clear in his nominalist answer to the question whether it constitutes one principle or many. Though drawn at times to talk of a unitary Grund ‘presenting itself in a fourfold aspect’,13 ultimately Schopenhauer rejects the notion of a ‘ground in general’ (einen Grund überhaupt),14 reducing PSR to an aggregate and leaving no scope for the formation of a novel, non-empirical conception of Grund such as those freely employed by the German Idealists.15 The concept of reason in general or as such becomes a mere abstraction; what unifies the four principles is simply their fundamental character and epistemic immanence, that is, our knowledge of them as constituting the form of objects within the world as representation. It follows that PSR extends only to the phenomenon, not to the thing in itself or ‘inner essence’ of things, to which it is entirely ‘foreign’.16 The implications of its contraction are, as Schopenhauer at one place spells them out: that ‘the laws of the faculty of reason are not absolute laws’; that ‘there is just as little unconditioned as conditioned, just as little God as world’; that the question of how the world and nature have arisen can be likened to ‘the talking of one who is still half in a dream’; and that in the realm beyond nature ‘there is really no why and no wherefore’.17 Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR goes hand in hand with his concept empiricism, according to which concepts arise only from intuitive representations, formed by abstraction from immediately given data in much the way that British empiricism tells us.18 This avoids returning us to Hume’s denial of all objective necessity, as an orthodox Kantian might object, because on Schopenhauer’s account experience itself—intuitive representation, in his terminology—contains seams of necessity, defined by the four sub-forms of 11  The critical intention becomes more pronounced in the amplified second edition of 1847, but is clear even in the first (1813). 12  FR 14–16, 18–19, 228–9. 13  FR, 162–3, 232. 14  FR, 234. See also FR, 2–4, 231; WWR II, 641; and VgP, 494. I discuss Fourfold Root in more detail in Sebastian Gardner, ‘Schopenhauer’s Contraction of Reason: Clarifying Kant and Undoing German Idealism’, Kantian Review 17, 2012, 375–401, Section 3. 15 See FR, 234. 16  For example, WWR I, 128, 163; WWR II, 579; PP II, 94. 17  MRCD, 430–1. 18  ‘[I]‌f we wish to call any concept objective, then it must be one which demonstrates its origin and object in sensuous feeling (the five senses)’ (MRCD, 357); ‘concepts have no meaning other than their relation to intuitive representations (whose representatives they are)’ (MRCD, 471). See also FR, 15, 146–8; WWR I, 39–42; and MRCD, 298–9, 468.

112   Sebastian Gardner PSR.19 Where Schopenhauer departs from Kant is in his claim that no independently originating concepts are brought to the data of intuition or are required to make possible cognition of objects. And this denial of the pre-existence of concepts in any form, along with the impossibility of forming new concepts not already implicated in PSR-structured experience, is taken by Schopenhauer to entail the strict meaninglessness of any employment of concepts outside the domain of representation. The scope which Kant allowed to remain for employment of the unschematized categories—to provide the necessary foundation for our thought of problematic objects, ideas of reason, and exercise of pure practical reason—is thereby eliminated: conceptuality and the world as representation are rendered co-extensive, and the Kantian faculty of reason is collapsed into the understanding. Schopenhauer supports this conclusion by arguing that Kant’s central argument for the necessity of differentiating Vernunft from Verstand, the Antinomy of Pure Reason, is bogus.20 What drove Schopenhauer to this major departure from Kantian doctrine—and indeed to focus, in his very first work, on an officially antiquated piece of philosophical apparatus with unmistakeable Leibnizian-Wolffian connotations—is his perception of what inevitably happens when PSR is allowed to remain in the partially deflated yet fundamentally intact state that Kant leaves it in: to wit, the spectacular reinflation which it receives at the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.21 After Kant had reduced the positive epistemic significance of PSR to (i) the principle of causality and (ii) the regulative function of reason,22 the German Idealists reinstate the principle through their demand for absolute systematic completeness, and embark on the (in Schopenhauer’s eyes, futile) business of formulating new conceptions of what may count as a Grund, their speculative innovations involving transcendent use of Kant’s categories.23 19 

To clarify their relation: Schopenhauer’s account of PSR does not presuppose and is not argued for via his concept empiricism. Schopenhauer’s concept empiricism, however, is not independent of his account of PSR, since this is presupposed by his account of the intuitive representations from which concepts are formed. What concept empiricism adds to the contraction of PSR is the closing of a loophole which the transcendent post-Kantian might seek to exploit, viz., the possibility of novel conceptual construction. 20  The theses of all four antinomies are, Schopenhauer argues, groundless: dialectical illusion is purely one-sided, and the world infinite in all its dimensions. See MRCD, 480–5; WWR I, 492–501; and VgP, 492–6. 21  ‘Just as though Kant had never existed, the principle of sufficient reason is for Fichte just what it was for all the scholastics, namely an aeternae veritas’ (WWR I, 33). That Fichte alerted Schopenhauer to the importance of PSR is suggested by his annotated lecture notes. In a lecture transcript from 1811 Schopenhauer records Fichte’s identification of Wissenschaft with ‘the region of reasons or grounds’, which is ‘supernatural or spiritual’, and of the Wissenschaftslehre with ‘the reason or ground of all knowing’ (MRCD, 22, 28). In WWR I, 33, Fichte is charged with construing the ego-world relation, on the basis of PSR, as a ground-consequent relation. 22  See Béatrice Longuenesse, ‘Kant’s Deconstruction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’, in Kant on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 23  Again and again Schopenhauer returns to the point that German Idealism rests on a transcendent and hence illegitimate employment of a priori concepts, especially that of causality: MRCD, 22, 359, 372, 376, 378–9, 384–6. In an annotation to lectures from 1811–12, Schopenhauer identifies Fichte’s fundamental mistake with his ‘failure to understand Kant’s teaching’ (‘possibly due to a defect in Kant’s doctrine’) that explanation stops with immanent causes, and describes Fichte’s appeal to the I qua ‘principle’ as a concealed attempt to circumvent this restriction (MRCD, 64; see also 124 and 134). Note that Kant too, on Schopenhauer’s account, fell victim to

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   113 The German Idealist reinflation and redeployment of PSR, as well as evincing the epistemic hubris that Kant sought to curb, has a substantive implication which makes it especially objectionable to Schopenhauer. PSR is connected closely in early modern rationalism with the ontological argument, which Schopenhauer sees the German Idealist systems as attempting to revive: Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is ‘Onto-theology’,24 and Schelling ‘venerates the ontological proof’, of which Hegel’s ‘whole pseudo-philosophy’ is really a ‘monstrous amplification’.25 Schopenhauer views his situation and role in the history of philosophy as reproducing that of Kant: just as Kant pitted himself against the Leibnizian-Wolffian school, so Schopenhauer takes up arms against German Idealism, aiming to achieve a more decisive outcome by a more direct and far-reaching attack on PSR.26

6.2.2  Schopenhauer’s Axiological Premise The second ground floor assumption of German Idealism controverted by Schopenhauer, I said, is its endorsement of Kant’s conception of the source of value, which represents in Schopenhauer’s eyes yet another abortive attempt to optimize reality. The pessimism that Schopenhauer famously advocates in opposition has, however, a more complex structure than his expositions of the doctrine allow readers to suppose, and this complexity is a consequence of his treatment of PSR. Schopenhauer’s argument often appears to be that the evil of the world derives from the negative hedonic balance sheet that necessarily characterizes human (and any other sentient) existence.27 However, in so far as its aim is to establish something about the metaphysical quality of the world, this argument fails to convince, relying as it does on a phenomenologically strained reduction of the objects of desire and valuation to hedonic states:  that the satisfaction of every desire is followed immediately by the formation of a new one does not mean that things are not better for its having been satisfied; and in any case there is value, by ordinary lights, simply in being a creature that forms and acts on desires, beyond the experiences of satisfaction that doing so may or may not procure. Schopenhauer’s argument from the predominance of suffering is better viewed, however, not as the main point but merely as an auxiliary element in his case for pessimism, which has the following form. Ultimately Schopenhauer considers the evil of existence an incontestable given, belonging to the physiognomy of the world and not open to debate.28 The problem for the illusion cast by PSR (MRCD, 463n.), and bears some responsibility for the German Idealist development (MRCD, 64, 412; FR, 164, 176; VgP, 252–3). 24 

25  FR, 16; see also FR, 21–3. 26 See WWR I, 418, 510–11. MRCD, 111. WWR I, §57, and Book IV, passim; PP II, Ch. 12. On this argument, see Christopher Janaway, ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, in Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28  As Nietzsche recognizes: ‘The ungodliness of existence was for him something given, palpable, indisputable . . . unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 2nd edn. [1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §357, 307). That it has axiomatic status is shown by the way in which it is invoked: see, for example, MRCD, 391; and WWR II, 577, 581–4, 643. It is the original motor, and a condition of, philosophical reflection: see WWR II, 171, 579, and note 40. 27 

114   Sebastian Gardner Schopenhauer is to articulate this insight within the parameters available to him. To be sure, the contraction of PSR undermines directly attempts such as Leibniz’s to validate the world, and any other account (such as those of Schelling and Hegel) which rests on an appeal to final causes. It also cuts off the Kantian source of value in human freedom.29 But at the same time, the confinement of PSR to the interior of the world as representation appears to remove the basis for any rationally grounded negative assessment of the world or its contents considered collectively. Schopenhauer thus seems poised to embrace the sheer value-indifference of reality, in the manner of Spinoza, or any contemporary naturalist for whom talk of reality’s having either positive or negative intrinsic value is nonsensical, but doing this would not give him what he wants, which is, to repeat, recognition of the positive reality of evil, as an intrinsic, necessary feature of the world, inseparable from it.30 His task is to give sense to this idea. Now Schopenhauer is quite clear that practical consciousness, including the whole domain of value, is orthogonal to the world as representation: it is what gives the world as representation its ponderousness, its non-illusory quality, but it has no grounds within it; practical and axiological significance shines through objects, weighing them down, but reflecting nothing of their mere object-being.31 If the evil of the world as representation is to be demonstrated, therefore, it can only be by attention to the way in which it manifests what lies beyond it, namely, Wille.32 The crux of Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism consists accordingly in showing (1) that the world as representation derives from a reality which is intrinsically and necessarily without purpose, (2) that the world as representation does not merely reflect that underlying reality or reproduce it in appearance—which would suffice only for Spinoza’s conclusion of value-indifference—but reveals itself to be metaphysically defective in relation to it. Book II contains the demonstration of (1). The sections of WWR important for (2) are those in which Schopenhauer explains why, once we have achieved knowledge of Wille, the world as representation must be perceived as contradictory—an incoherent mis-expression in individuated form of a pre-categorial oneness or unindividuatedness, which moreover reproduces this incoherence within itself, in the form of the conflict of individuated wills with one another and within themselves.33 The relevant discussions are those, chiefly in Book IV, of (i) natural teleology (concerning

29  Directly through its implication of psychological determinism, and indirectly through its elimination of ideas of reason, undermining all of the special devices employed by Kant to conserve human freedom in the face of the causal principle. 30  In his very earliest notes, from 1808–9, Schopenhauer describes the world as ‘only an image of an actual evil existing in eternity . . . the (Platonic) Idea of that real, inexplicable and unconditioned evil’ (MREM, 9). 31  WWR I, 95 and 98–9. 32  Note that the mere ‘emptiness’ or nullity (Nichtigkeit) of the world as representation in the sense of its insubstantiality and illusoriness (Scheinbarkeit) consequent upon the purely relational constitution of phenomena (WWR I, 7, 366; VgP, 474–7), is not sufficient for pessimism (life’s dream-likeness does not of itself make life a bad dream or a dream that ought not to be dreamt). 33  This metaphysical contradiction, note, is to be distinguished from the actual contradiction which constitutes denial of the will to live (WWR I, 288, 301). The former, which obtains between the two worlds or world-aspects, is realized and becomes explicit in the latter, which obtains between the phenomenon and itself (as its self-renunciation) or between Wille and the phenomenon (WWR I, 402–3).

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   115 the conflictual structure of the organic realm, which exhibits the ‘inner antagonism of the will’),34 (ii) sexual desire (the subordination of individual will to life to that of the species),35 (iii) eternal justice (which grasps individuation as a fault or ‘sin’, to be corrected),36 (iv) egoism and ethical conduct (the error of affirming one’s individuality, and its overcoming through higher knowledge),37 and (v)  renunciation, resignation, and asceticism (rationally necessary denial of the will to live, consequent upon higher knowledge).38 The general character of things in the world, Schopenhauer says, is not imperfection but rather ‘distortion’, reflecting the fact that each thing is ‘something that ought not to be’.39 Since the main work in substantiating pessimism has been done as soon as it has been established the world ought not to be, the role of the argument from suffering is limited. What it adds, through its reminder that human life does not merit our good opinion on account of its hedonic quality, is an uncommonsensical re-interpretation of hedonic experience in light of the metaphysics of will: Schopenhauer directs us to grasp pleasure and pain not phenomenologically but as manifestations of a purposeless dynamic.40 The painfulness and ubiquity of pain are therefore, in themselves, not what establishes the truth of pessimism: suffering is probative in the case for Schopenhauer’s doctrine only on account of what it displays regarding the irrational character of reality; his detailed portrait of man’s misery provides a posteriori corroboration of the metaphysical claim.41 I will consider later whether this is cogent. For the present, the point is that Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, and his axiological vision, are interrelated and mutually supporting. If evil has positive reality, then this testifies to the limitedness of PSR, and if PSR is limited, then theodical strategies for explaining away the manifest evil of the world, and hence denying its positive reality, are blocked. Moreover, through the reduction of PSR to a mere relational structure for phenomena, the existence of evil is explained, as supervening on individuation: in Schopenhauer’s brilliant reversal of Leibniz, PSR is not what saves us from evil but the source of evil itself.

34 

35  WWR II, Chs. 42 and 44, esp. 538–40. WWR I, 144–9, 161. WWR I, 331 and §63; WWR II, 580–2, 604; PP II, 301–2. See also the remarks on tragedy, WWR I, 252–5. 37  WWR I, §61, §§64–6. 38  WWR I, §68. 39  PP II, 304. ‘[I]‌ndividuality is really only a special error, a false step, something that it would be better should not be’ (WWR II, 491–2; see also WWR II, 579 and 604). 40  We are to grasp the flow of hedonic experience, its repeated cyclical relapse into some or other mode of suffering, as it were formally (rather in the way that we, Schopenhauer supposes, apprehend Wille in music). Schopenhauer reformulates the idea interestingly in the assertion (directed against Schelling) that I find myself necessarily ‘not in an absolute state’ but rather in ‘a state from which I crave release’, described as ‘the motive of all genuine philosophical endeavour’ (MRCD, 360, 361, 365). 41  Just as natural science, according to Schopenhauer’s argument in On the Will in Nature, corroborates the metaphysics of will. It is to be noted that Schopenhauer has also an axiological argument for his pessimistic metaphysics (mirroring Kant’s claim that moral interest argues for the truth of transcendental idealism): his metaphysics are required—once the contraction of PSR has been accepted—in order to preserve the possibility of salvation in the face of our mortality (WWR II, 643–4). More broadly, Schopenhauer offers the inducements that—again, given the results of Kant’s philosophy—no other way of endowing suffering with meaning, or of rescuing any truth in Christianity, is available (MREM, 10; MRCD, 338; WWR I, §70; WWR II, Ch. 48). 36 

116   Sebastian Gardner

6.2.3  Schopenhauer’s Inversion of Fichte: The Blindness of Wille Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, and his axiological vision, underpin his inversion of Fichte’s post-Kantian reconception of the subject as a primarily and essentially volitional conative being. In order to become clear about what exactly this comprises, it is necessary to look in some detail at the position Fichte develops in his System of Ethics. 42 Fichte begins, in Cartesian style, with the thinking of oneself. The task is to determine what this involves and how it is possible. Fichte argues that originally, at the level of the facts of ordinary consciousness, the I must find itself not as thinking, that is, as intellect, but as willing,43 and that to find oneself more specifically as a willing from which all that is foreign has been abstracted, as the task at hand requires, is to find oneself as a tendency (Tendenz), or faculty or power (Vermögen), towards self-activity. Alternatively put: I find myself as a tendency to determine myself absolutely, without any external impetus, or again, as a tendency to self-activity for self-activity’s sake.44 And since, in thus finding oneself, one finds oneself as (identical with) that which is found, and since, equally, that which does the finding brings what it finds under the sway of concepts, the I in finding itself as a Tendenz grasps itself also as an intellect. Consciousness of self, as having both power and freedom, arises therewith: the I grasps itself as capable of giving itself determinations through concepts.45 The problem which now arises, according to Fichte, is that the conception which has been provided so far remains that of a mere power without actuality.46 Alternatively stated, the problem is that we have got only as far as an intellect that intuits itself as pure activity, standing in opposition to all subsisting and being posited.47 The solution, Fichte argues, is for the Tendenz to be thought to assume a 42 

This is a clearer and much revised reworking of material in Part Three of the 1794–5 presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre: J. G. Fichte, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, in The Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 256–68. Schopenhauer’s critical comments on Fichte’s System of Ethics are in MRCD, 399–406. It is in this text of Fichte’s that Johann Friedrich Herbart, in his highly critical review of the first volume of WWR (‘Rezension, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Arthur Schopenhauer. Leipzig, bei F. M. Brockhaus. 1819’, Hermes, oder, Kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur 20, 1820, 131–48), claims to find already formulated Schopenhauer’s thesis that will comprises the inner essence of the subject. 43  For the reason that thinking requires something objective set in opposition to it, if it is to become an object, whereas willing, at the level of facts of consciousness, stands necessarily in opposition to something objective: J. G. Fichte, The System of Ethics according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre [1798], ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 26. 44  That there is a ‘sake’ or aim—separating Fichte from Schopenhauer at the outset—is crucial. Schelling, in his still Fichtean System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1978), p. 35, considers and rejects the possibility that the self’s activity is fundamentally ‘blind’. 45  And only through concepts, Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 42. 46  The I’s finding itself as a Tendenz has not, we now see, been sufficiently accounted for; Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 43–4. 47  See Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 42.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   117 more robust form, which he calls drive, Trieb, defined as ‘a real, inner explanatory ground of an actual self-activity—a drive, moreover, that is posited as essential, subsisting, and ineradicable’.48 Fichte draws an analogy with the elasticity in a compressed steel spring as an inner ground of its activity. With this last shift, we are clearly approaching Schopenhauer’s conceptual neighbourhood. What should be emphasized for present purposes, however, are the features of this notion of drive which lock it into Fichte’s project. As we have seen, it is introduced by Fichte in the context of a transcendental enquiry into the possibility of self-consciousness. The problem set by self-consciousness can also be viewed, Fichte explains, in terms of the demand that we, in philosophical reflection, construct a concept, which we are to suppose available to the I itself, of the identity of subject and object. Now this demand, Fichte affirms, cannot be met:  one cannot think of oneself as that identity, since thinking introduces the very distinction that the identity is to exclude. The concept remains, consequently, ‘a problem or task for thinking’, an ‘empty place’ which we designate with an X.49 The drive to absolute self-activity which constitutes the being of the I is, it follows, a drive which aims at the I in its entirety, the unthinkable identity of subject and object. Fichte’s drive is, therefore, necessarily engaged with the space of reasons, inseparable from conceptuality, and constituted by a telos. It will come as no surprise to learn that it enjoys also a necessary connection with morality. The drive to self-activity, Fichte argues, manifests itself in and as a thought, which Fichte identifies with the categorical imperative, in the form of the principle of autonomy.50 Because the I in its entirety, the X of subject–object identity, cannot be grasped, the drive to self-activity must take the form of an approximation to it, consisting in ‘a reciprocal determination of what is subjective by what is objective and vice versa’; and to proceed with this reciprocal determination, Fichte argues, is to act under the (self-given) law of self-sufficiency, which excludes determination of the I by the Not-I. It is a consequence of this transcendental theory that Fichte can claim to have reconstructed Kant’s thesis of the equivalence of freedom and the moral law,51 and also to have effected a unification, not furnished by Kant, of practical and theoretical reason, finally putting beyond doubt the capacity of reason to be practical.52 Thus far, drive has been understood without any reference to the subject’s phenomenology, but it is a general methodological requirement of the Wissenschaftslehre that its model be shown to accord with the facts of ordinary consciousness. Fichte adds accordingly an account of how, and in what form, drive shows up in ordinary consciousness, namely as a feeling of drive, called ‘longing’ (Sehnen): an ‘indeterminate sensation of a need’ which is ‘not determined through the concept of an object’.53 The feeling of drive is therefore the final manifestation of an underlying structure which

48 Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 44.

50 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 48–63.

49 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 45–6.

52 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 56, 59–60.

51 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 55–6.

53 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 101–3. Fichte denies that willing can be identified with, or that

it originally manifests itself as, feeling (pp. 46–8, 85), but nonetheless presents the connection as necessary.

118   Sebastian Gardner has the character of a quintessentially rational task (Aufgabe), postulate (Postulat), or ‘ought’ (Sollen). If we now return to Schopenhauer, we can see immediately the various respects in which he, while endorsing Fichte’s insight that the metaphysical core of the subject consists in drive, turns Fichte’s theory on its head.54 What Fichte takes as merely the most superficial manifestation of rational end-directed conation, the feeling of drive, is treated by Schopenhauer as primary, and as a sufficient basis for metaphysical extrapolation.55 Schopenhauer, furthermore, takes volitional feeling in isolation from representational consciousness, whereas it belongs to the central thrust of Fichte’s argument that will and representation are reciprocally determining.56 On the basis of this isolated datum, Schopenhauer infers the essentially non-teleological and non-conceptual character of Wille. Given Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR, the inference is indisputably valid: there is indeed nothing in the bare phenomenal feeling of drive or will which invites, or could possibly warrant, the complex and abstract structure which Fichte takes it to manifest; Fichte’s interpretation of the facts of consciousness can get a purchase only because he assumes, as PSR entitles him to do, that there must be a reason for the existence of feeling, both in general and in this instance, as a type of mental state.57 Fichte’s claim that ‘the I itself has to be considered as the absolute ground of its drive’, and that ‘this drive appears as a freely designed concept of an end’,58 is thus inverted:  Schopenhauer treats drive, impersonally conceived and directed to no end, as the ground of the I.59 Released from individuation, purposeless drive is ready to assume the role of substrate of the objectual world as such.

54 

See Schopenhauer’s criticism of Fichte’s theory of willing in MRCD, 406–8, 413–14; willing, Schopenhauer counters, ‘cannot be defined’. 55 See WWR I, 109–10. 56 Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 81–7; in addition to the objects on which I act, my willing itself must be represented. 57  Thus Fichte analyses feeling as ‘sheer determination’, ‘a mere determinacy of the intellect, without any contribution on the part of the intellect’s freedom’, System of Ethics, p. 102. Compare Schopenhauer’s brief definition of feeling in WWR I, 51. Karl Fortlage, in his 1845 review of the second volume of WWR (extracted in Volker Spierling (ed.), Materialen zu Schopenhauers “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 119–26), defends Fichte: Schopenhauer’s concept of will without intelligence is, he argues, incoherent; in systematic terms, Schopenhauer represents merely an intermediation in the transition from Kant to Fichte (and Schelling). 58 Fichte, System of Ethics, p. 103. 59  Even if Schopenhauer’s non-Fichtean concept of will owes something to the Urwille posited in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift as primal being, Ursein—Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith [1809], trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 21—Schelling does not invert Fichte’s conception in the manner of Schopenhauer: the Urwille is without understanding yet not independent of it, because it is a yearning or desire for it, and is prescient, ahndend, of it; ‘the understanding is really the will in will’, and it joins with yearning to form God’s omnipotent and freely creative will. Schopenhauer’s low estimate of Schelling’s essay, as a bad reworking of Jakob Böhme, is in MRCD, 353–4, and FR, 22–3, and it is dismissed once again in PP I, 26. The substantial criticism made by Schopenhauer, reasserting once again the contraction of PSR, is that Schelling interpolates the ground-consequent relation within God (FR, 22). In PP I, 132, Schopenhauer denies Schelling’s influence.

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6.2.4  Schopenhauer and the Meta-Critical Problem The flat disagreement between Fichte and Schopenhauer concerning the nature of drive or will goes back to their philosophical starting points and widely divergent views of the problems that need to be solved. We see here what a large part is played in generating Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conclusions by his prior refusal of the German Idealist agenda. In taking transcendental subjectivity as an unconditional basic element in his analysis of representation in Book I of WWR, and in asserting that it stands in a relation of bare Korrelation with objects,60 Schopenhauer rejects implicitly the Kantian idea, which Fichte preserves, that the subject’s object-consciousness must be treated as an explanandum. Schopenhauer’s discarding of Kant’s theory of synthesis is closely connected with this rejection: on Schopenhauer’s account, the subject is necessary for objects qua their correlate, but it is not involved in constituting the unity fundamental to objecthood in the way that Kant hypothesizes, just as the subject’s unity of consciousness receives for Schopenhauer no explanation of its possibility by reference to the unity of objects. Again, when in Book II Schopenhauer raises the question of how the subject of representation comes to cognize itself as an individuated content of the objective world,61 the question is understood—this we can infer from the way in which it is answered— as precisely not involving a solution to the problem of self-consciousness as Kant and Fichte understand it: Schopenhauer simply lays it down that the subject of thought is able to grasp itself as one and the same in representing and willing, in other words, that the bare phenomenal having-of-feeling involved in volitional episodes suffices for a grasp of myself as willing.62 The question with which Fichte labours, concerning the very possibility of the I’s attributing efficacy to itself, is nowhere raised.63 All in all, then, a range of transcendental questions formulated and addressed in the Transcendental Deduction and elsewhere in Kant, taken by Fichte and the later German Idealists to frame the task of post-Kantian philosophy, are set aside by Schopenhauer, whose form of post-Kantian idealism is to that extent appropriately described as, in the strict sense, non-transcendental.64 Whether this implies a reversion to ‘dogmatism’ or 60 See WWR I, §5.

61 

WWR I, 99 and 103. In response to Fichte, Schopenhauer asserts that the I ‘is merely intuitively perceivable’: ‘an I is something found merely as a fact, something simply given’ (MRCD, 73). Schopenhauer’s refusal to accept that there is a problem concerning how the I can become an object for itself is explicit in comments on Schelling, MRCD, 381 and 383. 63  To be fully clear, the transcendental question is not raised; what is raised is a question concerning the inter-relations of facts of consciousness, which Schopenhauer answers by reference to bodily awareness. The body cannot provide an answer to the transcendental question, since, even if awareness of embodiment provides an explanation of how volitional as opposed to representational consciousness is possible, as Schopenhauer asserts (WWR I, 100–1), the identification of oneself with one’s body is presupposed and not accounted for. It is also noteworthy—as another aspect of the inversion that I have been pointing to—that Schopenhauer’s assumption that the body explains volitional awareness reverses the order in Fichte, who derives the physical power of efficacy from the practical principle governing the I and the necessity of determining one’s freedom: see Fichte, System of Ethics, pp. 71–91. 64 See MRCD, 466–72, where Schopenhauer repudiates the task of transcendental logic, viewing it as rendered redundant by the appreciation that the understanding is a faculty of intuitive perception. Schopenhauer’s rejection of transcendental argumentation is explored in Paul Guyer, ‘Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Method of Philosophy’, in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge 62 

120   Sebastian Gardner otherwise constitutes a weakness is a separate matter, about which something will be said in the next section. For the present, it may simply be noted that a clear rationale for Schopenhauer’s divergence from Kant and his rival post-Kantians can be located, once again, in his axiological commitments, in so far as the transcendentalist ambition of excogitating transparent foundations for knowledge and value implies a determination to discover the world to be rational through and through. Support for this non-transcendentalist construal can be found in Schopenhauer’s early notebooks, in which he works through major positions occupied in the early post-Kantian development. Included here are Schulze’s scepticism, J. F. Fries’ and Jacobi’s Glaubensphilosophie, Fichte’s subjective absolute idealism, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Real-Idealismus, and all of the other innovations contained in Schelling’s writings up to and including the Freiheitsschrift. Schopenhauer had therefore a wide range of post-Kantian options at his disposal.65 What is striking in the early notebooks, however, is the absence of any sustained constructive engagement with the meta-Critical issues thrown up by Kantian philosophy. Schopenhauer records his dissatisfaction with all of the positions on offer, availing himself of their mutual criticisms, but proposes no answer of his own to the question of how propositions about non-empirical matters can be known and their truth ascertained. Nor, as I indicated earlier in emphasizing Schopenhauer’s non-transcendentalism, is this deficiency remedied in WWR. Arguably, the best construal of Schopenhauer’s position on meta-Critical issues is as a kind of semi-sceptical return to naivety: Schopenhauer appears to suppose that, since none of the ambitious and innovative post-Kantian developments yield an improved account of Kant’s position, the Critical method is best regarded as a practice of simply reading off metaphysical truths directly from the facts of consciousness.66 The Kantian task of proving transcendental propositions is eliminated, and the vital Kantian question of whether what we are necessitated to think corresponds to how things themselves must be, is overtaken by the metaphysical assertion of two worlds, one constructed within representation and the other unrepresentable.

Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See, however, Rudolf Malter’s transcendental reconstruction of Schopenhauer, ‘Schopenhauers Transzendentalismus’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 66, 1985, 29–51, and Günter Zöller’s comments in ‘Schopenhauer and the Problem of Metaphysics: Critical Reflections on Rudolf Malter’s Interpretation’, Man and World 28, 1995, 1–10. 65  The list is not complete. Reinhold is absent, and does not figure in Schopenhauer’s published works, even though his own approach has similarity with Reinhold’s conception of analysis of the facts of consciousness. Fichte criticized this conception and to some degree, in rejecting Fichte, Schopenhauer is returning to Reinhold’s plainer view of Critical method. Hegel is also missing from Schopenhauer’s early notebooks. In later writings Schopenhauer focuses on the metaphysical results of Hegel’s Logic, which he regards as a variant of Schelling’s position (PP II, 27–8); nowhere (to the best of my knowledge) is the method of the Phenomenology discussed in any detail by Schopenhauer. 66  They are ‘seen and grasped a priori’; a priori laws are simply ‘given to the understanding’ (MRCD, 335–6). The post-Kantian to whom Schopenhauer here comes closest is Fries. In comments on Aristotle Schopenhauer asserts that ‘there is no knowledge of knowledge’ (MRCD, 454). Note the extremely minimal definition of transcendental philosophy at PP II, 9, as starting from consciousness rather than things; the fuller account at PP I, 82–4, identifies it merely with the thesis of the a priori origin (‘rooted in our brain’) of the essential laws of the world.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   121

6.2.5  The Architecture of Schopenhauer’s System There is another respect, connected with the foregoing, in which Schopenhauer’s project contrasts with that of the German Idealists. As we have seen, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre has as one of its principal aims the exposure of a common root of Freedom and Nature, and of the practical and theoretical. The German Idealists’ project of unification—their aim, taking its cue from the third Critique (as they understood it) yet going beyond it, to comprehend Kant’s dualities in a single system in such a way as to exhibit their common source as an essential unity—is not shared by Schopenhauer.67 Schopenhauer does not, however, merely reaffirm the necessity of an incompletely unified, multi-component system of philosophy of the sort that Kant considers the most that human reason can achieve. His relation to the post-Kantian unificatory project is more complex. Schopenhauer’s distance from the project of unification arises in part from his avoidance of one of the key Kantian dualities: since Schopenhauer denies the existence of practical reason in the sense maintained by Kant,68 the doctrine of the primacy of pure practical reason—with all of the complications that it creates concerning the respective rights and interests, and the necessary strategies of integration, of practical and theoretical reason; issues of huge importance to Fichte and the early Schelling—does not figure at all for Schopenhauer, who instead straightforwardly identifies philosophy as such with theoretical philosophy, in Kant’s sense.69 Within this context, however, Schopenhauer reasserts Kant’s practical/theoretical duality in the form of the distinction of the world as Wille, which gives it, as noted, all of its practical significance, and the world as representation, which exists for the necessarily disinterested subject of knowing.70 Kant’s practical/theoretical distinction is conserved, therefore, through its outright identification with another core Kantian duality, that of appearances and things in themselves. This has a major implication, which refers us back to Schopenhauer’s rejection of Kantian practical reason and inversion of Fichte’s account of the will: if practical consciousness is analysed in terms of Wille, then Ought is reducible to Is; contrary to Fichte’s view of the absolute primacy of the Sollen, there can be nothing more to oughtness than awareness (in one mode or another) of the being of Wille.71 By virtue of its dualist architecture, then, Schopenhauer’s system stays closer to Kant than do the German Idealists, but in so far as Schopenhauer resolves all dualities into the single one of 67 

The ‘main tendency of the Kantian philosophy’ is instead ‘to demonstrate the complete diversity of the real and the ideal’ (PP I, 86; see also 25). 68 See MRCD, 337–8; WWR I, 522–3; VgP, 418–20. For a concise statement of his anti-Kantian, broadly Humean view, see MRCD, 351. 69  WWR I, 271, 285. Schopenhauer conserves Kant’s idea of the special connection of ethical conduct with metaphysical truth (e.g. WWR I, 384; WWR II, 600), but without Kant’s cognitive privileging of the ‘practical point of view’. Ethical action is for Schopenhauer an enacting or acting out, a symbolization within the world as representation, of the reality of Wille, cognition of which is theoretical. 70  WWR II, 499. 71  Schopenhauer celebrates Kant’s notion of ‘a point of view where the moral law appears not as an ought (Sollen) but as a being (Sein)’ (MRCD, 326–7). See the criticism of the imperatival form of Kantian ethics in §4 of BM, 136–43. The shift of idiom, from Sollen to Sein, is pursued in Schopenhauer’s account of human freedom, in terms of intelligible character: see FW.

122   Sebastian Gardner Wille and Vorstellung, Schopenhauer follows at least part of the way the unificatory vector of German Idealism. There is a further respect in which Schopenhauer takes the side of German Idealism against Kant. Kant’s reservations concerning the possibility of systematic completeness are grounded on his thesis of the inherent limitations of human reason. Schopenhauer’s anti-monism, by contrast, is untethered from the idea of epistemic limitation. The distinction of Wille and representation is absolute in a sense not admissible for Kant: it represents a denial not just of the possibility of our forging a philosophical system with the strong unity sought by the German Idealists, but of the metaphysical possibility that Wille and the world as representation form a real unity. So, whereas Kant leaves it open, and necessarily thinkable, that the dualities within human reason are united at some point which transcends our cognitive powers—indeed the third Critique teaches that beauty and natural teleology at least point to (if no more) a unitary ground of the sensible and supersensible— Schopenhauer’s position is that the several roads of philosophical reflection which we must go down in our endeavour to solve the riddle of existence do not join up at any point.72 Again this is a direct implication of his contraction of PSR. The next question to be considered is whether Schopenhauer succeeds in charting a clear course between Kant and Fichte-Schelling.

6.3  Schopenhauer’s Difficulties 6.3.1  Wille as Ground of the World as Representation Schopenhauer denies that the relation of the will or thing in itself to the phenomenon is a relation of causality.73 This follows from Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR. But Schopenhauer does not allow the realm of the thinkable to coincide with the boundaries of the world as representation, nor does he confine explanation to relations between worldly objects, for the world itself ‘is to be explained solely from the will whose objectivity it is, and not through causality’.74 The problem is straightforward. So long as some element of explanation is involved in referring the phenomenal world to Wille—and Schopenhauer speaks readily of metaphysical Erklärung 75—some employment of the categories of ground and consequent, as Kant would put it, must be present. The explanation may be non-causal, but it must nonetheless incorporate a ‘because’ relation. Without it, we are simply left with (at 72   In a comment on Schelling, Schopenhauer complains of his forcing a false unity on the human subject, ‘as a bridge to unite the two worlds’: the genuine, critical philosopher by contrast is ‘content to have . . . recognized the twofold nature of his being’, which ‘appears to him as two parallel lines which he does not bend or twist in order to unite’ (MRCD, 376–7). If they meet, it is in a sphere accessible only to the mystic. True philosophy, ‘instead of uniting the two heterogeneous worlds into monstra . . . will always try to separate them more completely’ (MRCD, 412). 73  For example, MRCD, 489, WWR I, 120, 140, 502–7. 74  MRCD, 489; see also WWR I, 507. 75  For example, PP II, 91; contrary to his own explicit claim, in WWR I, 80, that Erklärung is the establishment of ‘the relation of the phenomena of the world to one another according to the principle of sufficient reason’.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   123 most) sub-propositional, non-conceptual awareness of the world as awash with a certain all-pervasive mental quality, the quality possessed by acts of will; and although this might provide the cue for some such metaphorical thought as that the world ‘insists itself’ or ‘exerts pressure’, obviously it will not provide Schopenhauer with a sufficient basis for any of the determinate discursive conclusions that he wants to extract from his grounding of phenomena on Wille.76 Viewed from another angle, the problem lies in Schopenhauer’s taking it for granted that the objectual world as such can pose a ‘riddle’ at all. In order to even form the thought of the world as constituting an explanandum which demands a metaphysical explanans— that is, as not simply explicable, and adequately explained, in so far as its contents are interrelated in accordance with PSR—it is necessary to suspend Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR.77 The problem shows itself also in Schopenhauer’s axiology. Schopenhauer’s pessimism rests, I suggested, on the perception of a metaphysical dissonance, for which it is essential that the world of representation be ontologically subordinated to, and measured in terms set by, the world as Wille; this is what allows Schopenhauer to strike down, as normative illusions, the ends that human beings set themselves. But it may be wondered if this strategy succeeds. The mere judgement that one layer of reality is dependent on another may be necessary, but is it sufficient, for the negative assessment of the world as representation, its condemnation as ontologically defective? There is no obvious logical principle

76  I do not know of any passage where Schopenhauer addresses this issue, and it may be asked why he does not do so. At one place Schopenhauer appears to address the similar though even more basic problem of how it is possible for us to think (form a concept of) will at all, given its heterogeneity with representation and non-conformity to PSR: ‘[T]‌he concept of will is of all possible concepts the only one that has its origin not in the phenomenon, not in the mere representation of perception, but which comes from within, and proceeds from the most immediate consciousness of everyone’ (WWR I, 112). If Schopenhauer can be allowed this on the basis of his concept empiricism, then we can conceptualize features of or phenomena in the world not tied to PSR. But what still cannot be accounted for is the relation between Wille and Vorstellung required by his metaphysical ‘because’ claim: there can be no ‘immediate experience’ of because-ness (or, if there can, then we have intellectual intuition after all). My conjecture is that Schopenhauer supposes implicitly that the ‘because’ relation, or all that he needs it to amount to, is given immediately in the experience of bodily willing. The relation of (i) my (subjective experience of my) willing my arm to rise, and (ii) the objective event (in the world as representation) of my arm’s rising, is declared to be a relation not of causation but identity (WWR I, §18). Schopenhauer may suppose that this intuition of the will–body nexus—our immediate grasp of it as identity-like yet asymmetric, with body depending on will and not vice versa—provides what is needed for his metaphysical extrapolation. This construal of his thinking gets support from his emphatic claim that we discover in self-consciousness a meeting point of subject and object, and of phenomenon and Wille (WWR I, 102; WWR II, 497). But again—even granting this ‘miracle par excellence’—this does not solve the problem of how we come to think this intuited ontological fact in the way Schopenhauer requires, namely as a quasi-causal quasi-identity. For this reason, Schopenhauer can get no mileage out of pressing a distinction between ‘the subject of knowing’ and the ‘subject of representation’: even if non-representational cognition is possible, its content must still be thought; else it is mystical (and Schopenhauer denies that his metaphysics are ‘illuminist’: PP II, 10). 77 At WWR II, 640, Schopenhauer comes close to conceding that the further metaphysical questions which, he allows, his system does not answer, ‘cannot be thought by means of the forms and functions of the intellect’. The question is why this is not true also of the metaphysical questions which, he maintains, his system does answer.

124   Sebastian Gardner compelling us to take the stronger view, and there are grounds for thinking that in arriving at this verdict Schopenhauer relies on elements he is not entitled to. At key junctures Schopenhauer appeals to what he calls our ‘better consciousness’,78 but in so far as its superiority is merely asserted, it is open to the Kantian, or German Idealist, to object that Schopenhauer faces a hard choice: either the superiority of the standpoint that he recommends, from which we condemn the world as a cosmic mistake, is merely stipulated (or, as the Nietzschean may suggest, a matter of motivated taste); or it has normative foundations, in which case Schopenhauer has betrayed his own contraction of PSR to the world as representation, and his ‘better consciousness’ is playing the role of affording a higher level of reflection which Vernunft plays in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. To put the point another way: the problem is that we are required to understand the ‘expression’ of Wille in the world of representation in a normative sense, since we are to judge that the latter is a mis-expression of the former; but a normative understanding of the concept is inadmissible given the contraction of PSR.

6.3.2  Schopenhauer’s Two Models The foregoing points to a tension in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. Two ideas essential to Schopenhauer’s position are, first, that there is no properly intelligible relation between Wille and the world as representation, and, second, that the latter must be regarded as a higher species of illusion, as the ‘veil of Maya’.79 What this naturally suggests is that the expression of Wille in the world as representation consists in its objectification (Objektivation) in the sense of the subject’s making an object of cognition, a Vorstellung, out of Wille. Although cognitively nothing is achieved thereby, since the PSR-defined formal structure of cognition falsifies Wille, the character of Wille as purposeless striving shows up in the concrete, non-formal features of the world as representation. Here the relation of Wille to representation is grasped from the angle of the subject. This model, which we might call epistemic or perhaps ‘Eastern’, tallies of course with Schopenhauer’s claim to be upholding Kant’s insight into the ideality of empirical objects, and arguably provides a ground for pessimism, in so far as its derealization of the world as representation strips the objects of human valuation of genuine reality. It also agrees with the conception of ethics as founded on compassion,80 and it helpfully allows Schopenhauer to dismiss, as reflecting a misunderstanding of his position, the question of the nature of the overarching unity of the world(s) of Wille and representation.81 If the sphere of 78 

MREM, 23, 46, 72; MRCD, 19, 373, 374, 376, 416, 430, 431. It is exhibited in virtuous conduct, and associated with genius. Plausibly Schopenhauer’s notion of better consciousness owes something to Fries’ conception of Ahnung. 79  WWR I, 8, 17, 523. 80  To amplify: it allows the apparently inchoate thought entertained by the virtuous agent—viz., that I should act benevolently because I am the suffering other and do not exist as ‘I’ (see BM, 211–13)— to be validated as tracking the incoherent shape of reality as presented to a subject who has grasped that the world as representation is mere illusion. 81  As it does the notion, which Schopenhauer allows to suggest itself, and which we will see is developed by Hartmann, that Wille gives birth to transcendental subjectivity in order to restore itself to tranquillity, and so is not blind after all.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   125 Vorstellung is an illusion, so too is its correlate, the transcendental subject, the ‘existence’ of which, along with the world of objects, can be attributed to epistemic error and held to be dissolved through its correction. This model is, however, by no means consistent with everything in Schopenhauer’s picture. It is doubtful in the first place that it fits with the reading of expression demanded by the idea that Wille constitutes the inner Kern of the subject and other individuated entities,82 a conception underlined in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of natural science, which demands metaphysical grounds for natural phenomena.83 In particular, the epistemic model does not cohere with the claim that Wille finally achieves cognition of itself. Some of Schopenhauer’s statements suggest that attributing self-knowledge to Wille just means that one of its individuated products has self-knowledge (or perhaps: knows itself to be an individuated product of Wille), but the full story of denial of the will does require that Wille itself, not merely its individual human objectifications, achieve genuine cognitive (and, thereby, practical) reflexivity.84 The epistemic model thereupon gives way to a metaphysical (or ‘Western’) conception, familiar from Schelling, according to which reality undergoes a real transformation in so far as it assumes a new form in human subjectivity.85 The expression of Wille in the world as representation now amounts to Objektivation in the quite different sense of Wille’s making itself into an object, by giving itself determinate form,86 and its being an object of cognition, an object for a subject, becomes secondary, a supervening consequence of the self-expressive activity of Wille. Here the relation of Wille to representation is grasped from the angle of Wille. This shift of conception rationalizes the doctrine of denial of will, but it creates difficulties for all of the elements that the epistemic model makes sense of. In particular it interferes with the argument for pessimism. If Wille in fact becomes the world as representation, then there is scope for deeming the latter a transcendence of the former, a newly created, higher reality which sets its own terms of evaluation: if Wille has ceased to be blind and acquired a real teleology, then the ends projected by sentient beings cannot be cancelled as metaphysical errors.87 82 

In statements such as: ‘The will appears in everything, precisely as it determines itself in itself . . . all finiteness, all sufferings . . . belong to the expression of what the will wills, are as they are because the will so wills’ (WWR I, 351). 83 See WWR I, §27; WWR II, Ch. 26; PP II, Ch. 6; and WN. Also relevant is Schopenhauer’s endorsement of occasionalism, WWR I, 138. 84  This is required if Wille is to, as Schopenhauer says, ‘freely abolish itself’ by ‘relating such knowledge to itself’ (WWR I, 285, 288). It is also implied by the notion that, in the individual’s denial of the will to live, the freedom which Wille alone can possess is manifest, ‘immediately visible’, in the phenomenon (WWR I, 402; see also 403 and 404). 85  See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. 86  Thus Schopenhauer talks of Wille, reflexively, as ‘objectifying itself ’ (sich objektivirenden Willens), ‘entering the form of representation’ (in die Form der Vorstellung eingegangen ist) and thereby ‘becoming knowable’ (WWR I, 115, 120, 506). 87  The Western model does not therefore cohere with the abolition of Wille itself (in addition to the world as representation), which Schopenhauer seems to say follows from denial of the will to live (WWR I, 410–11). This claim appears to demand both models: in order for quieting of Wille, as opposed to mere dissolution of illusion, to ensue from the denial, it is necessary that Wille be genuinely present in the phenomenon; but if it is so present, then Wille has genuinely become a sphere of individuated objective entities, and it is unclear how it can retract its self-transformation.

126   Sebastian Gardner Thus, although the two versions of Objektivation—epistemic objectification by the subject, and Wille’s metaphysical self-determination—are not inconsistent, and might be taken as complementary views of the same event, which is perhaps how Schopenhauer wishes to think of them, the two models have, as we have seen, contradictory implications for key theses in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. That Schopenhauer may indeed have granted both models a place in his metaphysics, invoking them in different contexts without appreciating their incompatibility, is rendered likely by his assertion of a grounding relation between Wille and representation not governed by PSR: in so far as the relation is indeed in reality one of ground and consequent, the metaphysical model is implied; in so far as it eludes PSR, it can consist only in epistemic error.

6.3.3  Between Kant and German Idealism In addition to the doubling of Eastern–epistemic and Western–metaphysical models, a separate tension can also be identified in Schopenhauer, occurring at a more fundamental, metaphilosophical level, and which is consequent upon the complex movement of his philosophy away from German Idealism and back to Kant, and then again forward from Kant to reoccupy the territory of German Idealism. I claimed earlier that Schopenhauer asserts an absolute distinction of will and representation, entailing the impossibility of a real unity of Wille and the world as representation. Such a claim, not hedged by any Kantian epistemic qualification to the effect that dualism is simply the best that our cognitive powers can manage, is what Schopenhauer needs in order to counter German Idealism’s monism at its own level. But such absolute dualism, as it may be called, sits ill with Schopenhauer’s avowed commitment to immanence and the standpoint of ordinary empirical consciousness.88 It is consequently fair to describe Schopenhauer as seeking to negotiate a way between two opposed positions:89 on the one hand, Kant’s view that only perspectival conclusions, judgements about the nature of things relativized to our cognitive capacities and having only the status of necessities of representation, are licensed; and on the other, the non-perspectival absolutism of the German Idealists, which rejects Kant’s separation of mere necessities of representation from the true necessities governing things as they really are.90 Schopenhauer internalizes both approaches to metaphysics, and seeks to combine them in a novel way. The product is a conception of two worlds, which are not so much ontologically unequal in virtue of their possessing a different degree of reality according to a single measure, as ontologically heterogeneous in so far as each is associated with and defined by a different conception of what being consists in: in the case of Wille, being is conceived as intrinsically antithetical to cognition, and in that of Vorstellung, it is identified with it.91 Though we must treat the two conceptions as bearing on the same world, their 88 

WWR I, 272–3; WWR II, 640; PP II, 6–9. Reflected in his (semi-paradoxical) statement that philosophy is ‘conditioned knowledge of the absolute’ (MRCD, 358–9). 90  Schopenhauer lays claim to ‘absolute truth’ (‘in so far as such a truth is in general attainable’), WWR II, 472; will is ‘that which is absolutely real in every being’, PP II, 95. 91  ‘[T]‌he word being means “being known through the senses and the understanding” ’ (MRCD, 421). 89 

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   127 heterogeneity entails that the relation between them cannot be grasped.92 This feature is present also, to some degree, in Kant’s account—in so far as Kant denies that the relation of appearances and things in themselves is open to theoretical cognition—but it becomes problematic in Schopenhauer in a way that it is not in Kant, in virtue of the fact that, as we have seen, Schopenhauer eliminates the basis supplied by Kant for the co-thinkability of the two worlds, namely the categories. Schopenhauer’s accommodation of mysticism fits into this picture in the following way.93 In so far as Schopenhauer counters German Idealism’s monism with an absolute dualism, Schopenhauer appears exposed to charges of incompleteness: a whole range of questions is, he acknowledges frankly, left unanswered.94 Mysticism provides a solution:  Kant’s modest, epistemically qualified, perspectival conception of philosophical knowledge is re-invoked at the outer limit of Schopenhauer’s system as a ground for legitimating mystical claims, allowing Schopenhauer to acknowledge his system’s explanatory limitations while reaffirming its philosophical completeness. One final observation may be made, concerning the way Schopenhauer recasts Kant’s distinction of appearances and things in themselves. As noted previously, Schopenhauer’s contracted PSR differs from Kant’s principles of experience in not owing its truth to any normatively defined epistemic function (of ‘making experience possible’) that it performs for us. The knowledge we have of PSR is instead of a kind that, in Kant’s terms, belongs (like the claims of the German Idealists) to dogmatic metaphysics: it specifies the entire intrinsic constitution of a type of object (albeit a very special type, which includes cognition within its constitution). Our knowledge of the sphere defined by PSR is thus not mere perspectival knowledge, in the way that for Kant knowledge of appearance counts as a mere perspective on something (unknown) that is not itself appearance. Furthermore, although knowledge of the world as representation is not knowledge of a substance—since it does not contain the condition of its own existence—its (unique and sufficient) ontological requisite, namely, Wille, is known to us. We know, therefore, both the essence and the ground of the world as representation. Now, just as Schopenhauerian Vorstellung is not Kantian Erscheinung, so Schopenhauer’s thing in itself is not Kant’s, and in Kant’s terms, Schopenhauer’s claims to knowledge of the world as representation—namely, as constituted internally by PSR and grounded externally on Wille—is already knowledge of a thing in itself: though Schopenhauer’s contraction of PSR restricts its domain, PSR enjoys with respect to that domain the same kind of absolute metaphysical validity as it enjoyed (with respect to being in general) for Spinoza and Leibniz. In this unexpected way, Schopenhauer’s development of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which he intended as a radical alternative to the Fichte-Schelling form of post-Kantianism, ends up, in the respect indicated, firmly on their side.95 92 

WWR II, 497, ‘the two heterogeneous sides of the world . . . are absolutely incommensurable’. WWR I, 410; WWR II, 610–14. 94  As he acknowledges: WWR II, 640–1. WWR II, 579: ‘even the most perfect philosophy will always contain an unexplained element, like an insoluble precipitate or remainder’. 95  This result is not so surprising, when we recall Schopenhauer’s alignment of Kant’s idealism with that of Berkeley (WWR I, 434–5, 444; WWR II, 8), whose idealism is by Kant’s lights a form of transcendental realism. The point can thus be put as follows. Schopenhauer makes clear that his understanding of Erscheinung takes an extra, Berkeleyan step beyond Kant’s (VgP, 482–9), and because for Schopenhauer the subject–object relation is one of bare Korrelation, and the object’s existence 93 

128   Sebastian Gardner If the difficulties I have indicated are genuine, then Schopenhauer’s deconstruction of German Idealism does not succeed. To press the point home: it is a consequence of the foregoing that the very charges that Schopenhauer lays against Schelling can be levelled against his own system. Schopenhauer repudiates the intellectually intuited ‘indifference point’ of Schelling’s identity philosophy, claiming that Schelling’s positing of an absolute unity of the subjective and the objective violates the principle of contradiction and results in mere pseudo-concepts.96 But if Schopenhauer requires us to think the world as a superimposition of two dissociated conceptions, then he puts us in the same position as that which he criticizes in Schelling. The ‘either-or, neither-nor, both-and’ character of Schelling’s point of indifference is reproduced in the structure of Schopenhauer’s system, which hinges on a supposition of the very same order—namely, that Wille can both be and not be the world as representation. The same combination of conjunction and exclusive disjunction is involved. The difference from Schelling is only that Schopenhauer has not made the supposition formally explicit, and chooses to describe our knowledge of the coming together of Wille and the world as representation as mere ‘negative knowledge’.97 But again it does not look as if the negative character of our knowledge creates a real difference: Schopenhauer may not talk of a faculty of intellectual intuition, or develop a theory of construction in concepts, but still he must posit a capacity to grasp in some manner the nexus of Wille and representation, on pain of foregoing the claim that philosophical knowledge is involved here at all.98

6.4  The Post-Schopenhauerian Development I want now to look at the post-Schopenhauerian development, with a view to showing how it bears witness to the problem created by his contraction of PSR, and to charting Schopenhauer’s influence on late nineteenth-century philosophy. Distinguished in the following sub-sections are five systematic possibilities, mapped onto actual historical developments.99 Each represents a different move that, it may be thought, Schopenhauer may, or should, make in response to the difficulties generated by his attempt to persevere

consists in its relatedness to the subject (as it does for Berkeley, on one reading), our mode of cognition, Erkenntnisart, is for Schopenhauer not a (merely formal) condition to which objects are subject and hence relativized in so far as they are cognized (as it is for Kant), but an (unrelativized) ontological component of those objects (as they are an sich). 96 

For example, MRCD, 342, 359–60, 371–3, 391, and WWR I, 26. Schopenhauer is on weak ground here, in so far as his own claim to possess the concepts of object, subject, and Korrelation, which define the sphere within which PSR operates, appears to assume intellectual intuition or its equivalent. 97  WWR I, 410; WWR II, 612. 98  It is highly significant in this context that Schopenhauer describes Kant’s account of intellectual intuition in §76 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement—passages inspirational for the German Idealists, and which, one might think, Schopenhauer ought to have dismissed as one of Kant’s regrettable errors—as ‘the pith of the Kantian philosophy’ (MRCD, 326–7). 99  I provide only selective coverage; for a comprehensive view of Schopenhauer’s influence and successors, see Fabio Ciracì, Domenico M. Fazio, and Matthias Koßler (eds.), Schopenhauer und die Schopenhauer-Schule (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2009).

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   129 with substantive metaphysical claims while contracting reason. In each case I will note very briefly its arguable limitation from Schopenhauer’s perspective or a problem that it encounters.

6.4.1  Modifying German Idealism from Within: Late Schelling Schelling’s late philosophy is of course not a development of Schopenhauer’s philosophy but an independent development within German Idealism, which was already underway, though it had not come to completion, by the time Schopenhauer came on the German philosophical scene.100 It merits consideration here nonetheless, in so far as the late Schelling may be regarded as attempting to modify German Idealism in a way that incorporates the conviction at the root of Schopenhauer’s project: Schelling had in clear view from 1804 onwards the very problem that appears to mark the limit of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system, namely how to express and explain, in discursive terms and with reasoned justification, the failure of the real to be the rational. In his Essay on Human Freedom of 1809 Schelling tries to revise the system of idealism in a way that will accommodate the possibility of evil, something which, he argues, Kant, Fichte, and by implication his own earlier forms of idealism had precluded. This involves Schelling in rethinking the Absolute, or God, as primordially will, without conceptual form or understanding, ‘blind longing’. Reason, on this account, is something that comes to be, in and through God’s volitional self-realization. The pattern mirrors Schopenhauer: first there is will, then there is the space of reasons; and the possibility of evil derives from the ‘excess’ of reality over reason, the residue of non-rational will carried over into rationally formed reality.101 What might be claimed therefore is that, though Schopenhauer’s reassertion of the unsolved problem of evil poses a challenge which the incurably optimistic systems of Fichte and Hegel cannot meet, the challenge is eventually met by Schelling. The notion that Schelling takes the wind out of Schopenhauer’s sails encounters, however, the following obstacle. True to Kant, Schelling identifies evil as such with human moral evil—and this allows Schopenhauer to grant for the sake of argument that

100 

See note 59. The details of the later Schelling’s view of reason do not belong here, but it is worth indicating the basic difference between his and Schopenhauer’s respective contractions of PSR. This may be viewed in terms of their different attitudes to the thesis of the absolute identity of being and knowing maintained in Schelling’s identity philosophy of 1801–2. This Schopenhauer simply negates by asserting its antithesis, that is, that being (in itself) and knowing are absolutely alien to one another. Schelling by contrast thereafter continues to regard the identity thesis as containing truth, but not as ontologically primary, the important point being that, though the domain conforming to PSR is ultimately restricted, Schelling regards it as intelligibly continuous with its pre-rational ground. Thus in the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling locates the birth of reason in God’s self-grounding, to which it is related teleologically (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 30). In his later philosophy of revelation, the relation between PSR and what lies outside it is formulated in terms of the (again intelligible and ultimately complementary) relation of negative to positive philosophy: see The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures [1842–3], trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), esp. pp. 127–54. 101 

130   Sebastian Gardner Schelling’s revision to German Idealism might account for the evil that enters the world through human action, while denying that it does anything to acknowledge the evil which is written into the fabric of the world (the evil which, to take an example from a relevant context, incites Adrian Leverkühn to take back the Ninth Symphony).102 The following four neo-Schopenhauerian developments divide into two groups, according to whether they either approach Schopenhauer from the angle of German Idealism and attempt to resolve the tension in his system by working it into that context, or on the contrary propose to cut him loose from it. The pair comprising the first group can be described as ‘metaphilosophically realist’, in the sense that they regard Schopenhauer’s metaphysical claims as aiming at plain theoretical truth (in accord with Schopenhauer’s own view of their logical character) and as having immodest, non-Kantian, absolutist import. They subscribe accordingly to what I  called Schopenhauer’s ‘Western’/metaphysical model, eschewing the illusionistic dimension of Schopenhauer’s treatment of empirical reality.

6.4.2  Union with Hegel: Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious Eduard von Hartmann regards Schopenhauer’s attempt to annex a metaphysics of will to empirical reality as essentially correct, but as suffering principally from the defect that Schopenhauer fails to explain how conceptual structure enters the picture. The teleological metaphysics of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869, grounds natural phenomena in a manifold of unconscious acts of will, unified ultimately under the single act of will which he calls the (All-One) Unconscious. Thus far Hartmann is following, and developing, Schopenhauer’s line in On the Will in Nature. Hartmann departs from Schopenhauer, however, by interpreting the teleological metaphysics of nature as revealing the existence of an original synthesis of Hegel’s Idee and Schopenhauer’s alogical Wille, the dual equiprimordial constituents of reality. Nature falls out of their union: the Idee furnishes natural kinds and the order of nature, while Wille gives these actual existence, bringing to life and imparting movement to Hegel’s ghostly edifice. The broad philosophical significance of his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann explains, is that it comprises an overcoming of the antinomy formed by Hegel and Schopenhauer, yielding a super-system in which their respective deficiencies are corrected: the Schopenhauerian element allows Hegel to answer the familiar charge of panlogicism, while Hegel provides the ideational structure which Schopenhauer is unable to account for.103 102 

Whether the objection succeeds depends on whether Schelling’s suggestion that man’s moral evil infects creation at large can be sustained: see Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 103–4. 103  For a selection of Hartmann’s criticisms of Schopenhauer, see Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science [1st edn., 1869], trans. William Chatterton Coupland (from the 9th edn, 1882) (London: Kegan Paul, 1931), Vol. I, pp. 29–31, pp. 117–19; Vol. II, pp. 101–2, pp. 339–43; and Vol. III, pp. 149–51. Hartmann reads the Hegel–Schopenhauer relation through the lens of Schelling’s distinction of negative and positive philosophy, Hegel supplying the Was or Wie of things and Schopenhauer the Daß. To that

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   131 The crucial, striking element in Hartmann’s neo-Schopenhauerian metaphysics is the notion of an absolutely original, unconditioned union of Idee and Wille. This presents the following difficulty. The union is either rational or not, but if it is not, then it is impossible to understand how Idee can be affected by Wille, while if it is, then Wille must lie already within the space of reasons. It seems that, if the union is possible, then Wille must be proto-ideational and Idee must be proto-volitional; in which case their union amounts to the actualization of each through the other, their mutual realization in a hylomorphic relationship (suggesting, perhaps, that Idee and Wille cannot after all be absolutely primitive). This might be counted an interesting new addition to the neoplatonic canon, and it is arguably the position that Hartmann ought to have taken, but it is not, in fact, how he wishes to conceive matters: the Idee-Wille synthesis, Hartmann maintains, is indeed unintelligible; we must regard it as an error or wrong,104 that can be characterized only in quasi-mythic terms (on the model of sexual union).105 And with this it becomes clear that, contrary to the expectations raised by talk of a Hegel–Schopenhauer synthesis, Hartmann has not eased the tension present in Schopenhauer concerning the relation of Wille to PSR, nor has he intended to do so: rather he has singled it out, theorized it explicitly, and reaffirmed it at the apex of his system. The gain in explicitness is, however, offset—from Schopenhauer’s point of view—by the way in which Hartmann’s reconfiguration appears to remove irrationality from the world and relocate it outside, in its mere ontological antecedents.

6.4.3  Schopenhauer in the language of Hegel: Julius Bahnsen’s Realdialektik Whereas Hartmann aims to fortify Schopenhauer’s system by melding it with Hegel’s, his contemporary Julius Bahnsen recasts Schopenhauer’s central ideas in the terms of Hegel’s dialectic. According to Bahnsen, there are, as Hegel says, contradictions in reality—the blame for antinomy falls on the object, not the thinking subject—but these are, as per Schopenhauer, functions of its character as Wille, not of an autonomous dynamic of the Begriff. The contradictions arise because will inherently contradicts itself—to will is to will not-towill: every desire aims at its own extinction. The space of reasons just is the appearing (Schein) of the self-contradicting activity of Wille, and PSR the ‘law’ which governs it.106 Because conceptuality is nothing over and above Wille’s manifestation of its self-negating essence, there is nothing within it, no potential for autonomy, that could lead to an overcoming of the world’s constitutive contradictions. Whereas Hartmann marries Wille with reason, its ontological equal, Bahnsen’s more authentically Schopenhauerian approach reduces reason to Wille; again, whereas Hartmann concedes to Hegel the genuinely rational

extent, Hartmann’s manoeuvres may be viewed as an exploration of the first option, that is, as resolving Schopenhauer into late Schelling. 104 Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. II, p. 273, and Vol. III, pp. 124–5. 105 Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. II, Ch. XV, Sect. 2.

106  Julius Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt. Princip und Einzelbewährung der Realdialektik (Berlin: Grieben, 1880), p. 206.

132   Sebastian Gardner character of reality as given to us, Bahnsen follows Schopenhauer in ascribing an irrational character to the conceptually formed world. Pessimism, the defence of which (as noted earlier) presents Hartmann with a difficulty, is thus firmly reinstated.107 Bahnsen’s metaphysics lacks nothing in strangeness, yet may be regarded as again a consistent development from Schopenhauerian premises. Bahnsen’s original contribution to neo-Schopenhauerianism lies in his substitution for the antagonism of PSR with Wille a primordial antagonism within Wille itself. This facilitates what Schopenhauer denied to be possible, namely, a grounding of PSR, thereby converting Schopenhauer’s absolute dualism into an absolute monism. In a supreme reversal of Wolff, PSR is derived from a principle of self-contradiction. Of greatest importance for present purposes, however, is Bahnsen’s novel articulation of Schopenhauer’s core thesis. Bahnsen takes from Hartmann a term that is absent from Schopenhauer, antilogisch, in order to characterize the essence of Wille.108 He does so because he wishes to conceive Wille not as merely outside reason in the familiar and innocuous sense in which for bald naturalists nature and efficient natural causality lie outside the space of reasons, but as contrary or antagonistic to reason.109 This notion makes sense, however, only if Wille’s opposition to reason is a relation distinct from opposition in the material sense of conflicting causality, for example, the clash of physical forces, which is merely alogical or non-logical. The relation must instead comprise, or have a character akin to, logical opposition. The only thing that can be thought to stand opposed to logic as such is contradiction, the Contradictory. Bahnsen’s Antilogische provides for this not through dialetheism, the true conjunction of contradictory assertoric propositions, but through contradiction in will: performative, as opposed to constative, contradiction. Bahnsen’s Wille thus opposes reason in the mode of refuting or falsifying it, by dint of the fact that reality as a whole and in all of its individual forms—all possible candidates for satisfying or exemplifying reason—has in essence the nature of an impossible undertaking (a striving with the incoherent content: ‘to will-not-to-will’). Bahnsen’s Realdialektik unpacks and sharpens Schopenhauer’s claim that Wille is ‘foreign’ to PSR, but makes no advance with the problem that we have been tracking in Schopenhauer. According to Realdialektik, the relation of thought to reality too must exhibit contradiction, meaning that no philosophical system which grasps reality adequately can give a full and complete account of its capacity to do so; Bahnsen’s claim to knowledge of the self-contradictory essence of Wille is no less precarious than Schopenhauer’s claim to knowledge of the grounding of the world in Wille.110 107 Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, p. 210. Hartmann’s case for

pessimism is made in Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. III, Ch. XIII. 108  Hartmann denies that the will as such is anti-logical; it is merely alogical, and becomes anti-logical only in its act (Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. III, pp. 124–5). 109  This is made clear in Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, p. 6: in Objektivdialektik ‘it is a matter not just of the conflict of the laws of thought with one another, but of a conflict of the laws of reality on the one hand with one another and on the other with the laws of thought’; the dialectical character of the relation between elements in reality (gedachten Realen)—not insofar as they are contained in subjective thought but insofar as they stand in objectivity—is the same as that which can obtain between thoughts, ‘namely one of contradiction’. It is on this basis that Bahnsen differentiates his Realdialektik from Hegel’s merely subjective, ‘verbal’, ‘pseudo’ dialectic. 110  Which is not to say that Bahnsen fails to engage with epistemology: in the first part of Volume I of Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, ‘Das antilogische Princip: Einleitung in die Realdialektik’, Bahnsen tries to show that his system avoids self-refutation.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   133 Hartmann and Bahnsen give a fair idea of what can be done with Schopenhauer by reworking his thought in the terms of German Idealism. The alternative is to abandon the aspiration to plain theoretical truth. This may be buttressed by the suggestion that just as, according to Schopenhauer, Kant allowed the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy which comprised his proximate target to condition and compromise his own system,111 so Schopenhauer, too much under the spell of the idea of Philosophy-as-System, made the same mistake with respect to German Idealism. Two such ‘metaphilosophically anti-realist’ construals of Schopenhauer’s philosophy suggest themselves. They are independent but not exclusive, and both are associated with Nietzsche.

6.4.4  ‘Aestheticist’ Reconstrual of Schopenhauer If Schopenhauer’s system cannot lay claim to theoretical truth, it may still be construed expressively or aesthetically, or perhaps as a case of ‘showing’ what cannot be said, and in such terms a species of validity claimed for it. Whether or not such an approach counts as a poor second best, or entails a complete abandonment of cognitive ambition, will depend upon what general view is taken of the significance of aesthetic presentations and of the capacity of philosophical thought to attain theoretical truth; in the case of Wittgenstein’s rendering of Schopenhauer’s insights in the Tractatus, for example, it is not at all clear that cognitive inferiority is implied. An anti-realist understanding of Schopenhauer underlies Nietzsche’s non-committal use of his metaphysics in The Birth of Tragedy, where the Schopenhauerian dissolution of nature into a trans-phenomenal will is compared to a ‘light-image [Lichtbild] that healing nature holds up to us after we have glimpsed the abyss’.112 Though Schopenhauer himself barely wavers in his commitment to the unqualified truth of his system, there are moments when his concept empiricism may seem to draw him in such a direction—philosophy is described as merely depositing in concepts ‘a reflected image [reflektirtes Abbild]’ of the inner nature of the world.113 One way of developing this line in Schopenhauer’s own terms would be to claim that his philosophical system stands in the same sort of relation to man, or the human condition, as a work of art does to the Idea that it realizes. Since tragedy is for Schopenhauer the form of art that expresses most perfectly the Idea of man,114 Schopenhauer’s metaphysics would count as a theorization not essentially different from a tragic work but simply more abstract. The measure of the success of his system would consist, at least in part, in the application of criteria appropriate to a work of art—verisimilitude, resonance, hermeneutic traction, and so on. That Schopenhauer’s philosophy lends itself readily to such a perspective is testified by its extraordinary track record of literary inspiration. The essential point at any rate is that if Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of Wille are viewed aesthetically, then they are discharged from the task of explanation:  the distinction 111 

MRCD, 310; WWR I, 418; WWR II, 582. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music [1872], trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), §9, 47. 113  WWR I, 384. Or, again, as an ‘Abspiegelung der Welt, in abstrakten Begriffen’, VgP, 571. 114  WWR I, 252. 112 

134   Sebastian Gardner between answering and simply evoking the ‘riddle of the world’ disappears, and with it the tension created by his contraction of PSR. Also affected, however, is Schopenhauer’s axiological conviction: that the world is intrinsically and positively evil must now be regarded as something other than a straightforward fact about its nature.

6.4.5  ‘Practicalist’ Reconstrual of Schopenhauer: Nietzsche Nietzscheans may welcome the earlier conclusion that Schopenhauer fails in his endeavour to deconstruct German Idealism as showing the necessity of taking a greater initial distance from the legacy of idealism in order to overcome it. Nietzsche’s own deconstruction of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is well-known and needs only brief rehearsal. According to Nietzsche, what it means for the will or the practical to have primacy is not just for the intellect to be, as a factual matter, causally subordinate to the will, à la Freud. Certainly it entails that philosophical thought should reflect on its own motivation, but more deeply it means, metaphilosophically, that values, taken to be themselves non-metaphysical, replace metaphysical truth-claims in our understanding of the practical, and that philosophical reflection makes legitimate appeal to values in determining how to conceptualize the world. Practical orientation is understood with indifference to metaphysical questions (thus to some extent in a more Kantian way), and henceforth depth psychology replaces metaphysics in providing practical and axiological guidance. And this practical turn can be given a Schopenhauerian justification:  Nietzsche’s contention is that if the contraction of PSR is carried through consistently (and on his account there is further to go in dethroning reason) then practical and axiological concerns cannot be regarded any longer as topics in, or as subject to the authority of, metaphysics. In this light, Nietzsche argues, Schopenhauer’s own ground floor conviction that evil has positive reality must be re-examined, from which it emerges that this metaphysical judgement is a mere symptom of a defective constitution, lacking in truth and expressive of a stance towards the world which has no privileged rationality. Nietzsche thus converts Schopenhauer’s categorical judgement that the world is evil, is such that it ought not to be, into an act of will, a bare imperative of world-rejection. The respective claims of optimism and pessimism, keenly debated in the late nineteenth century, form for Nietzsche an antinomy resting on a false presupposition, and its dissolution opens up new horizons. Both the realist and the anti-realist developments can claim to stay true to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s project; Hartmann and Bahnsen may be regarded as restoring it to its terminus a quo, and Nietzsche as articulating its terminus ad quem. The latter is doubtless more congenial to us now, but its limitation—again, from Schopenhauer’s point of view— is worth noting. What holds Schopenhauer within metaphysics is not a failure to grasp the possibility of saying farewell to the whole business of trying to say something about the essence of the world: the basis for that post-metaphysical option is set out clearly in Fourfold Root. The reason why Schopenhauer does not take it is that the evil of existence is, for him, a hard fact, a fact so hard that only the thing in itself can do justice to its reality. From this angle, the primary task, the difficulty of which was not lost on Nietzsche, is to persuade Schopenhauer out of his conviction of the theoretical character of his insight; in other words, to demonstrate that the anti-realist reconstrual does not—as it will appear to Schopenhauer—amount to a loss of reality and betrayal of his insight.

Schopenhauer (1788–1860)   135

Bibliography Abbreviations employed in reference to Schopenhauer’s works: BM FR FW MREM MRCD PP VgP WN WWR

Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818) Manuscript Remains: Critical Debates (1809–1818) Parerga and Paralipomena, Vols. I–II Vorlesung über die gesammte Philosophie On the Will in Nature The World as Will and Representation, Vols. I–II

Atwell, John E. (1995), Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will (Berkeley: University of California Press). Bahnsen, Julius (1880), Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt. Princip und Einzelbewährung der Realdialektik (Berlin: Grieben). Cartwright, David E. (2010), Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ciracì, Fabio, Domenico M. Fazio, and Matthias Koßler (eds.) (2009), Schopenhauer und die Schopenhauer-Schule (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann). Fichte, J. G. (1982 [1794–95]), Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, in The Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fichte, J. G. (2005 [1798]), The System of Ethics according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gardner, Sebastian (2012), ‘Schopenhauer’s Contraction of Reason:  Clarifying Kant and Undoing German Idealism’, Kantian Review 17, 1–27. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1820), ‘Rezension, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Arthur Schopenhauer. Leipzig, bei F. M. Brockhaus. 1819’, Hermes, oder, Kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur 20, 131–48. Guyer, Paul (1999), ‘Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Method of Philosophy’, in Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press). Hartmann, Eduard von (1931 [1869]), Philosophy of the Unconscious:  Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, trans. William Chatterton Coupland (from the 9th edn, 1882) (London: Kegan Paul). Hübscher, Arthur (1989), The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in its Intellectual Context: Thinker against the Tide, trans. Joachim T. Baer and David E. Cartwright (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen). Janaway, Christopher (1989), Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Janaway, Christopher (1999), ‘Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, in Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kosch, Michelle (2006), Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

136   Sebastian Gardner Longuenesse, Béatrice (2005), ‘Kant’s Deconstruction of the Principle of Sufficient Reason’, in Kant on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Malter, Rudolf (1985), ‘Schopenhauers Transzendentalismus’, Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 66, 29–51. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1993 [1872]), The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974 [1887]), The Gay Science, 2nd edn., trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage). Schelling, F.  W. J. (1978 [1800]), System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia). Schelling, F.  W. J. (2006 [1809]), Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Schelling, F. W. J. (2007 [1842–43]), The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969 [1819/1844]), The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1974 [1847]), On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, 2nd edn., trans. E. F. J. Payne (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1974 [1851]), Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1986 [1820]), Vorlesung über die gesammte Philosophie d.i. Die Lehre vom Wesen der Welt und von dem menschlichen Geiste. In vier Theilen. Erster Theil: Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens, in Theorie des gesammten Vorstellens, Denkens und Erkennens. Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlaß, hrsg. u. eingeleitet von Volker Spierling (München: Piper). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1988 [1804–18]), Manuscript Remains: Early Manuscripts (1804–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 1 (New York: Berg). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1988 [1809–18]), Manuscript Remains:  Critical Debates (1809–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Vol. 2 (New York: Berg). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1991 [1836]), On the Will in Nature: A Discussion of the Corroborations from the Empirical Sciences that the Author’s Philosophy has Received Since its First Appearance, ed. David E. Cartwright, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg). Schopenhauer, Arthur (2010 [1839]), Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E.  Cartwright and Edward E.  Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Schopenhauer, Arthur (2010 [1840]), Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Spierling, Volker (ed.) (1984), Materialen zu Schopenhauers ‘Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Young, Julian (1987), Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Kluwer). Young, Julian (2005), Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge). Zöller, Günter (1995), ‘Schopenhauer and the Problem of Metaphysics: Critical Reflections on Rudolf Malter’s Interpretation’, Man and World 28, 1–10.

Chapter 7

K ier k ega a r d (1813–1855) Michelle Kosch Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813–11 November 1855) is the most important Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century. His contributions in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion took some time to spread beyond Denmark, but his influence on early twentieth-century German and French philosophy was substantial,1 and by mid-century his work had been translated into nearly 20 languages. The larger context of Kierkegaard’s thought was the German philosophy and theology of the early nineteenth century,2 but his approach to the issues that context presented was novel both in its content and in its mode of presentation. Although he published a series of works under his own name—including upbuilding and Christian discourses and a large monograph on Christian ethics—his most important philosophical works were published under a set of pseudonyms. The broader aim in these works is to present a set of comprehensive aesthetic, ethical, and religious life-views. The device of pseudonymity allowed him to argue for and against these life-views (and their components) from different perspectives. As a result we see them both as they look from the inside, to those trying to understand and direct their lives in the terms they provide, and as they look from the outside, to those with opposed commitments. Some views are portrayed as more adequate than others, in various ways, to the situation of existing subjectivity, and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus as a whole can be approached as a many-sided portrayal of that situation. The aesthetic view of life is a major focus in Either/Or (1843) and Stages on Life’s Way (1845), and a topic in Fear and Trembling (1843), Repetition (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846). It is characterized from two directions: positively, by characters who embrace it (in Either/Or, for instance, by A, the author of the papers in the first volume), and critically, by characters who do not (in Either/Or, by Judge Wilhelm, the author of the papers in the second volume).

1 

Especially important was his early reception by K. Jaspers and M. Heidegger, and, later, by J.-P. Sartre. 2  Apart from ancient sources (especially Plato) and some Danish thinkers (P. M. Møller, H. L. Martensen, J. L. Heiberg, F. C. Sibbern), Kierkegaard’s main influences (and opponents) were I. Kant, J. G. Hamann, the German idealists (J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel), the late idealists (I. H. Fichte, C. Weisse and their circle), L. Feuerbach, F. Schlegel, and F. D. E. Schleiermacher.

138   Michelle Kosch A number of configurations of the aesthetic approach to life are described in Either/Or I, ranging from the unstructured pursuit of one hedonistic pleasure after another (in the essay on the musical erotic) through a series of approaches organized around more reflective pursuit of more sophisticated goals that still revolve around aesthetic satisfaction, and culminating in the highly structured production of opportunities for pleasure that is never actually enjoyed (in the diary of the seducer). In all of these configurations the organizing aim is the production of some subjective state—of sensual pleasure, or of reflective pleasure in works of art, in one’s own self, or in other people rendered interesting by one’s own manipulation of them. Notably, the end points (purest immediacy and the aesthetic in its most reflective form) are ideal types: Don Juan is pure sensuality untouched by reflection, and is an operatic character; Johannes the seducer has a conception of seduction so intellectualized as to be in the end sexless, and is probably a fictional character of A’s creation. The portions of Either/Or I meant to reflect A’s actual state of mind convey neither extreme, but instead his sophisticated reflections on the pursuit of the beautiful and the interesting, interspersed with expressions of his own frustration, melancholy, and despair. Despair is the defining feature of the aesthetic view of life according to Judge Wilhelm’s negative characterization in Either/Or II. What he means by “despair” (Fortvivlesen) is not in the first instance a psychological state, but rather the aesthete’s denial that he is responsible for his actions and that his ends must ultimately be self-given. The Judge argues that A’s attempt to see himself as a spectator in life rather than a participant in it is a futile endeavor,3 and that the despair (in the psychological sense) that A complains of in some of the diapsalmata is a symptom of despair in this deeper sense.4 The message of this part of Either/Or is that the aesthetic view of life is self-defeating: it is a nominally normative stance (one that purports to be action-guiding) that at the same time denies some presuppositions of any such stance (e.g. the agent’s responsibility for his own decisions).5 Like the aesthetic standpoint, the ethical standpoint is characterized both positively and negatively—positively primarily by Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or II (and his counterpart in Stages on Life’s Way), and critically in The Concept of Anxiety, parts of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and in The Sickness unto Death (1849). 3  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 155; 1997–, 3: 168. The Judge argues (at S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 149; 1997–, 3:161) that A’s refusal to direct his life is itself a way of directing his life. Cf. also S. Kierkegaard 1901–06, II: 215; 1997–, 3: 228–229. 4  A himself embraces fatalism at several points in the first volume, and himself connects this fatalism to his psychological malaise. “My soul has lost possibility.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 25; 1997–, 2: 50) “It is not merely in isolated moments that I, as Spinoza says, view everything aeterno modo, but I am continually aeterno modo.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 23; 1997–, 2: 48) Cf. S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 6; 1997–, 2: 30. His maxim—not to begin anything, not to will (S. Kierkegaard 1901–06, I: 23; 1997–, 2: 48)—follows from his fatalism. The result is that he finds time senseless (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 13–14; 1997–, 2: 38), existence tedious (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 9; 1997–, 2: 33), and nothing meaningful (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, I: 15; 1997–, 2: 40). 5  I argue for this reading of the Judge’s criticism in M. Kosch 2006a. For similar interpretations see, for example, M. Taylor 1975; H. Fujino 1994. Other interpretations have been offered. Some take the fundamental weakness of the aesthetic standpoint to be the vulnerability to failure of aesthetic projects themselves (a vulnerability ethical projects are thought not to share). See, for example, W. Greve 1990; P. Lübcke 1991. Others take the fundamental weakness of the aesthetic standpoint to lie in its inability to support some aspects of a meaningful and fulfilled human life (such as a stable self-conception and stable interpersonal relationships). See, for example, A. Rudd 1993; P. Mehl 1995.

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)   139 Wilhelm defines the ethical view of life by contrast with the aesthetic: its central feature is the acceptance of personal responsibility. This emphasis on responsibility is a feature of the religious standpoints as well, and for this reason it makes sense to say that the most basic division between life-views in the pseudonyms has the aesthetic on one side and the ethico-religious on the other.6 What distinguishes the ethical stage from the religious is its commitment to an account of normativity based on the autonomy of the will. The Judge believes, with Kant and Fichte, that the negative concept of freedom as absence of determination by alien causes gives rise to a positive concept of freedom as self-determination, which in turn gives rise to a law or an end which gives content to the moral life.7 In enjoining A to choose the ethical, the Judge advises him to choose with utmost energy, arguing that the demands of the ethical become apparent as soon as one takes choice seriously.8 The criticisms of the ethical standpoint in the other pseudonyms target this basic premise; the claim is that it entails that morally wrong actions can never be fully imputable.9 This criticism is most fully spelled out in the second part of The Sickness unto Death, where the premise of the ethics of autonomy is linked with the Socratic–Platonic thesis that intentional action always aims at the good;10 a similar worry is voiced in The Concept of Anxiety.11 The message of these works is that, like the aesthetic view of life, the Judge’s ethical view is internally incoherent: the “either/or” that defines it (the emphasis on freedom and responsibility) is at the same time undermined by the account of the source of norms it presupposes, since on that account the agent never in the end confronts a true either/or.12 6  See H. Fujino 1994. The Judge sorts “speculative philosophy” (i.e. the philosophy of German idealism) together with the aesthetic standpoint as a view (though not a “life-view” in the full sense) that does not leave room for agency. Cf., for example, S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 155; 1997–, 3: 167. 7  In M. Kosch 2006c, I argue that J. G. Fichte was the primary historical model for the ethical standpoint described in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. J. Disse 2000 and H. Fahrenbach 1968 also present the Judge’s as a basically Kantian/Fichtean view of ethics. 8  He argues that the individual becomes an ethical individual by becoming “transparent to himself” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 231; S. Kierkegaard 1997, 3: 246) and becomes transparent to himself by taking choice seriously. “As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 152; S. Kierkegaard 1997, 3: 164). Cf. S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 192, 234; 1997–, 3: 205, 249. 9  In fact, accounting for imputable moral evil is a problem for both Kant and Fichte, and the Judge explicitly denies its possibility. I discuss Kant’s problem with accounting for moral evil in M. Kosch 2006b ch. 2. I discuss the reasons for Fichte’s denial of radical evil in M. Kosch 2006c. For the Judge’s denial, see S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 157, 159; 1997–, 3: 170, 171. 10  Anti-Climacus characterizes the common feature of the ethical views that are his target as their lack of “the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what is right and does the wrong” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 205; 1997–, 11: 96). “If sin is being ignorant of what is right and therefore doing wrong, then sin does not exist.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 200; 1997–, 11: 90) 11  Vigilius Haufniensis describes a “first ethics” (by which he means a non-Christian, philosophical ethics) for which “the possibility of sin never occurs” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 295; 1997–, 4: 330) or which includes sin “only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 289; 1997–, 4: 324). I argue for this way of reading those and related passages in M. Kosch 2006b, 160–74. 12  I argue for this reading of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the ethical standpoint in M. Kosch 2006b 155–78. Other accounts have been offered, most of which appeal not to the internal inconsistency of the ethical standpoint but to its incompleteness or inadequacy to some aspect of human experience. Some take its shortcoming to be the absence of individualized duties (see e.g. R. Adams 1987). Some

140   Michelle Kosch The ethical standpoint is thus, like the aesthetic, a form of despair (in Kierkegaard’s deep sense) and the typology of despair in the first half of The Sickness unto Death includes a form that corresponds to it: the “despair of wanting to be oneself.”13 The religious standpoint has two main configurations:  philosophical and revealed religion. In Philosophical Fragments (1844), Johannes Climacus presents the first as the “Socratic” account of ethico-religious knowledge, the second as an alternative to it. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript they are religiousness “A” and “B”. It is with the second, and with Christianity in particular, that Kierkegaard is most concerned; but he believed that its peculiar characteristics are best brought out by comparing it with the first. He approaches both—as with the other stages—as comprehensive views of life, examining how they function as normative frameworks (how they guide action), what they presuppose about the nature of human agency (and whether the presuppositions are plausible), and what it is like to take each of them as one’s perspective on life. These standpoints are again characterized from different perspectives in the different pseudonymous works. Johannes Climacus (in Fragments and Postscript) describes the epistemology and psychology of both from the perspective of someone who does not presuppose the truth of either. Anti-Climacus (in The Sickness unto Death and Training in Christianity (1850)) offers an account of the self, of normativity, and of the relation between these two, from within the Christian perspective. Vigilius Haufniensis explains the moral psychology of sin (on the Christian conception) in The Concept of Anxiety. (Christianity is the highest stage of existence in Kierkegaard’s scheme, and so there is no point of view higher than it from which it is subjected to criticism. That said, the difficulty of occupying it is vividly portrayed in all of these works, as well as in Fear and Trembling.) A great variety of religious views fall more or less under the “A” rubric as Kierkegaard describes it, and undoubtedly he meant for this to be the case. Although Socrates is the named source, surely Spinoza (especially Jacobi’s Spinoza) and Plotinus (whose influence on the German idealists and the larger philosophical culture of the time was substantial) figured among the historical models. These figures shaped the approach to religion shared by the German idealists, and the religion of idealism must sort under “A” if anything does. Fichte’s later religious writings may be particularly significant here.14 Like the ethical standpoint, religiousness A is characterized as an answer to the normative question that has its source in human reason; this is what Kierkegaard means when he describes A as “immanent” religiousness.15 The divine is conceived as a place mapped out within a philosophical system; everything about it is knowable by reason alone. The criterion of the good is union with God, and the task religiousness A sets for the individual is to take it to lie in an alleged inability of finite individuals to satisfy ethical standards without either divine assistance or the possibility of divine forgiveness (see e.g. A. Hannay 1982; J. Whittaker 1988; H. Fahrenbach 1968). 13 

S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 178–81; 1997–, 11: 181–4. Although Hegel’s account of religion fulfills the metaphysical and epistemic constraints of Kierkegaard’s description, it wholly lacks the element of existential pathos and emphasis on self-negation as an ethical project that are prominent in Postscript’s discussion of religiousness A. 15  Cf., for example, S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 498–9; 1997–, 7: 519–20. The early Fichte had distinguished dogmatism from the critical philosophy by saying that critical philosophy is “immanent” because it “posits everything within the self,” while dogmatism is “transcendent” because it “goes on beyond the self” (J. G. Fichte 1971, I: 120). It is this distinction Kierkegaard has in 14 

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)   141 overcome those aspects of her being in which finitude consists—not only finite desires and attachment to the world (“dying to immediacy”), but also the will itself insofar as it is the particular will of a particular individual. This is an ideal that it is possible to approach, but not to attain (since no human individual can entirely overcome his finitude).16 Moreover, it cannot be approached directly through individual effort (since individual agency is among those characteristics of finite existence that one is supposed to attempt to overcome); instead, the suffering that characterizes existence under the imperative of fulfilling an unfulfillable task is what brings about a transformation in the individual. The trial of existence is seen as having a reward, but because the trial cannot in any genuine sense be passed-or-failed, the reward is not contingent on the individual’s action.17 The ethical standpoint and religiousness A are therefore similar, in that in neither does the individual’s ethico-religious fate rest on his own actions.18 From the perspective of the agent, one decisive difference between the immanent views and religiousness B is that in the latter the individual is responsible for her own guilt or innocence.19 Another decisive difference lies in the epistemology of religiousness B, the primary topic of Philosophical Fragments. On the account given there, a normative criterion is given to human beings through revelation by a transcendent and otherwise unknowable God. The revelation is a contingent historical event; epistemic access to it requires the right sort of causal contact (either first-hand or through testimony). This event is at the same time the establishment of that criterion as normative for the recipient. Religious belief is justified, on this account, just in case it has the correct aetiology. But the possession of such justification is unverifiable in principle by any human being (including the believer). This is mind in describing both the “first ethics” in The Concept of Anxiety and the Socratic view in Fragments (in which “self-knowledge is god-knowledge” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 181; 1997–, 4: 220)) as “immanent” views. 16  Religiousness A is based on the idea that “the individual is capable of doing nothing himself but is nothing before God . . . and self-annihilation is the essential form for the relationship with God” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 401; 1997–, 7: 418). “The upbuilding element in the sphere of Religiousness A is that of immanence, is the annihilation in which the individual sets himself aside in order to find God, since it is the individual himself who is the hindrance.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 489; 1997–, 7: 509) 17  “Religiousness A makes existence as strenuous as possible (outside the sphere of the paradoxically-religious); yet it does not base the relation to an eternal happiness on one’s existing but has the relation to an eternal happiness as the basis for the transformation of existence. The ‘how’ of the individual’s existence is the result of the relation to the eternal, not the converse, and that is why infinitely more comes out than was put in” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 500; 1997–, 7: 522). Religiousness A “is oriented toward the purely human in such a way that it must be assumed that every human being, viewed essentially, participates in this eternal happiness and finally becomes eternally happy” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 507; 1997–, 7:529). 18  The close relation between these two standpoints is visible already in Either/Or II, in which the Judge presents a sermon by a pastor of his acquaintance on the topic “the upbuilding that lies in the thought that before God we are always in the wrong,” saying of it that “In this sermon he has grasped what I have said and what I would have liked to have said to you; he has expressed it better than I am able to” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, II: 304; 1997–, 3: 318). 19  Christianity differs from the ethical view in allowing for willful defiance: “In this transition Christianity begins; by taking this path, it shows that sin is rooted in willing and arrives at the concept of defiance” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 204; 1997–, 11: 94). It differs from religiousness A in that it does not equate finitude with necessary guilt: “Christianity has never assented to giving each particular individual the privilege of starting from the beginning in an external sense. Each individual begins in

142   Michelle Kosch because, on the one hand, the revealed criterion is not one to which human beings have alternative access (e.g. through reason), and so it is unverifiable by reference to any alternative.20 But, on the other hand, there can also be no adequate empirical evidence that some set of events is a revelation. Kierkegaard agreed with Kant that there can be no immediate, sensibly apprehensible marks of divinity or divine manifestation,21 and he agreed with Hume that the sort of mysterious or improbable events that might seem to constitute indirect evidence should be regarded with skepticism in direct proportion to their mysteriousness or improbability (that is, in direct proportion to their suitability as evidence for divine revelation).22 Having a religious justification for one’s actions is in practice indistinguishable from having no justification at all: although there is a distinction, it is one only God is in a position to draw. Kierkegaard follows Hamann, who in turn follows Hume, in concluding that the Christian must therefore view his own belief as itself a miracle.23 What Hume calls a miracle, Kierkegaard calls “the condition”: the subjective condition, imparted by God, for apprehending a set of events as a revelation.24 Fear and Trembling is in part a meditation on the normative situation of someone with this religious orientation. Abraham is of course not a Christian, but the justification of his actions in the binding of Isaac has a similar structure. Johannes de Silentio emphasizes an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature still hold true. The difference is that Christianity teaches him to lift himself above this ‘more,’ and judges the one who does not to be unwilling.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 342; 1997–, 4: 376–77) 20 

Kierkegaard’s disagreement with Kant and Hegel on the relation of priority of reason and revelation is spelled out most forcefully in Fear and Trembling’s Problemata (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 104ff.; 1997–, 4: 148ff.). 21  Historical contemporaneity is no advantage to the believer, since “divinity is not an immediate qualification” and even the miraculousness of a divine individual’s acts “is not immediately but is only for faith, inasmuch as the person who does not believe does not see” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 256; 1997–, 4: 290–1). Cf. I. Kant 1968, 7: 63 and 6: 87. 22  The project of giving a “probability proof” of the correctness of religious belief is absurd: “wanting to link a probability proof to the improbable (in order to demonstrate: that it is probable?—but then the concept is changed; or in order to demonstrate: that it is improbable?—but to use probability for that is a contradiction)” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 257n.; 1997–, 4: 292n.). Cf. D. Hume 1999 p. 183: “Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish.” Hume focuses on the evidence of testimony to miracles, arguing that since miracles are, by their nature, maximally improbable, any report of a miracle is therefore incredible. But an analogous argument applies, mutatis mutandis, to evidence of the senses. Experience of anything seeming to be a miracle is, because of the intrinsic improbability of miracles, far more likely to have been a sensory hallucination. 23  J. G. Hamann 1821–43, I: 406. Cf. D. Hume 1999, p. 186: “[W]‌hoever is moved by Faith to assent to [the Christian religion], is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.” Kierkegaard cites Hamann’s embrace of Hume’s conclusion in a journal entry of 10 September 1836, commenting: “one sees the complete misunderstanding between the Christian and the non-Christian in the fact that Hamann responds to Hume’s objection: ‘yes, that’s just the way it is’” (S. Kierkegaard 1909–78, I A 100; 1997–, AA: 14.1). Cf. S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VI: 103; 1997–, 6: 101. For further discussion of Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Hamann and its significance for the interpretation of Fear and Trembling in particular, see M. Kosch 2008. 24  “Only the person who personally receives the condition from the god . . . only that person believes” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 265; 1997–, 4: 299). “How, then, does the learner become a believer

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)   143 the impossibility of knowing oneself to be justified in religious terms, and the moral anxiety suffered by the person committed to acting on a divine imperative.25 This is part of the larger project in that text of portraying the religious life as more challenging than it is typically taken to be—driving up the price of faith, in the terms Johannes employs in preface and the epilogue.26 (This fact makes it all the more puzzling that Fear and Trembling is so often taken to contain an argument in favor of a religious view of life over a non-religious ethical one.27) Nor is Fear and Trembling the only pseudonymous text that portrays the difficulty of occupying this standpoint. Much of the Postscript is dedicated to an exploration of what Climacus calls the “existential pathos” of the A and B forms of the religious life, and he argues that the latter is “sharpened” in comparison with the former by the two features already mentioned: its account of the god-relation as a relation to a historically contingent apparition; and its emphasis on individual responsibility. The believer at the standpoint of religiousness A is certain of the object of his belief; and although the believer’s certainty is at the same time a consciousness of his necessary inadequacy (qua finite being), this necessity is itself reassuring. By contrast the combination of epistemic groundlessness on the one hand, and emphasis on individual responsibility on the other, renders the prospect of salvation extremely insecure, and the situation of the believer correspondingly psychologically strenuous, in religiousness B. In Postscript the language of “market price” appears again in the discussion of existential pathos, and the clear message is that salvation (in the terms proposed by religiousness B) is a reward so dearly purchased that it is, from a human perspective, lunacy to go in for it.28 or a follower? When the understanding is discharged and he receives the condition” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 228; 1997–, 4: 265). See also S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 228, 265; 1997–, 4: 265, 299. 25 

That Abraham is uncertain of his own justification is suggested at numerous points in the text: he is unable to sleep (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 126; 1997–, 4: 169), unable to reassure himself that he is legitimate (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 112ff.; S Kierkegaard 1997–, 4: 155ff.), can find reassurance from no one else (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 126; S. Kierkegaard 1997–, 4: 169)—not even another knight of faith (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 120; 1997–, 4: 163)—and is constantly tempted to return to the ethical and its relative normative security (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 109, 119–20, 160; 1997–, 4: 153, 162–3, 202). 26  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, III: 57, 166; 1997–, 4: 101, 208. See R. Green 1998, 258ff. and C. Evans 1981, p. 143, for readings of Fear and Trembling along these lines. 27  For a survey of this part of the literature, see J. Lippitt 2003 chs. 4 and 6, and R. Green 1998. For a rebuttal of what I see as the various possibilities for reading Fear and Trembling in this way, see M. Kosch 2006c. 28  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 336; 1997–, 7: 352. It has seemed plausible to many that Kierkegaard endorses a voluntarist account of Christian belief (see e.g. L. Pojman 1984). I do not believe the texts support this reading, and have argued against it in M. Kosch 2006b 187–200. But even someone convinced that Kierkegaard thought religious belief could be produced voluntarily would have a hard time convincing any reader of the Postscript that it could be rational, for prudential reasons, to produce it in oneself. Pascal is clearly the target of the remarks referenced here (at S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 336; 1997–, 7: 352); the wager on an eternal happiness would be irrational even if Christian belief could be reliably brought about by the means Pascal suggests. Neither can there be Jamesian reasons for believing, since on Kierkegaard’s portrayal, far from offering reassurance and so enabling action in the face of risk and uncertainty, Christian belief is itself the source of the most extreme risk and uncertainty. (Some interpreters, by contrast, have argued that the risk that accompanies Christian belief is thought by Kierkegaard to be itself a consideration in its favor (see e.g. R. Adams 1982 and J. L. Schellenberg 1993, 152–67). This is one of many approaches to arguments in Postscript that relies on

144   Michelle Kosch Far from offering any sort of apology for Christian faith, any justification (epistemic or prudential) of the religious standpoint or any attempt to make it more appealing to anyone not already occupying it, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works do just the opposite: they are dedicated to displaying the true extent of its difficulty. In Postscript, Climacus describes his particular authorial vocation as “making difficulties everywhere” in an age in which life in general—and Christianity in particular—has been made too easy.29 This is an important part of Kierkegaard’s own authorial vocation, persisting from early journal entries to the late writings attacking the Danish state church. For Kierkegaard, the only way open to human beings to help one another toward faith is a negative one: helping them to work their way free of the various attitudes that they might mistake for it. Thus Johannes de Silentio, while nominally praising Abraham, in fact demonstrates the impossibility of taking him (or anyone else) as a model of faith; and Johannes Climacus scoffs at the idea of wanting to reassure people about their salvation, claiming that in this area “the most one person can do for another is unsettle him.”30 Kierkegaard devoted much of his authorship to an extensive typology of moral character. The theory of agency on which that typology is based is presented most systematically in The Sickness unto Death. There, in terms that draw on Fichte and Schelling, Anti-Climacus describes the self as a synthesis that is self-relating and that, in relating to itself, relates to a power that posited it.31 To say that the self is a synthesis is to say that its activity involves bringing together and unifying disparate cognitive and conative states into a single consciousness. Anti-Climacus claims that the self is a synthesis “of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom[/possibility] and necessity.”32 The pairs of terms emphasize Kierkegaard’s view of human agency as an interplay of constraint and transcendence (a theme that appears in The Concept of Anxiety as well). The agent must integrate the givenness of herself with the set of goals or view of life she has taken up, forming her concrete embodiment into some ideal shape, but also tailoring the ideal to the unchangeables of personal history, social situation, and physical and psychological nature.33 Human freedom is both opposed to the constraints upon it and dependent on them—opposed because they place limits on possible actions, dependent because they provide the context in which actions make sense and so contribute to determining what actions they are. It is not and cannot be entirely clear where the freedom begins and the constraint leaves off; the agent continually faces the question of what is really possible given the constraints, a question that never finds a final answer.34 the assumption—nowhere confirmed by the texts—that Climacus is in the business of recommending Christianity to the non-Christian.) 29 

S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 155–56; 1997–, 7: 172. Cf. e.g. S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 349–50; 1997–, 7: 366–7. The theme is prominent in The Sickness unto Death as well. “The trouble is not that Christianity is not voiced . . . but that it is voiced in such a way that the majority eventually think it utterly inconsequential” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 213; 1997–, 11: 214). 30  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 336; 1997–, 7: 352. 31  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 127; 1997–, 11: 129. 32  S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 127; 1997–, 11: 129. 33  Note that what is at issue are “ideals” in a projective, but not in a normative sense. I agree on this and many points with P. Lübcke 1984. 34  “Where, then, is the boundary for the single individual in his concrete existence between what is lack of will and what is lack of ability; what is indolence and earthly selfishness and what is the

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)   145 To say that the self is a synthesis that relates to itself is to say that its activity is the object of immediate awareness and the possible object of reflective consideration.35 Self-relation encompasses a range of degrees of self-consciousness, from immediate awareness of what one is doing as one is doing it to the highest degree of reflectiveness upon one’s life as a whole. It subsumes any number of ways of conceptualizing, and stances taken toward, one’s activity (including refusal to consciously reflect on it). Self-awareness of any sort becomes part of any new synthesis (as when a negative evaluative attitude toward some intention causes one to abandon it). The characterization up to this point is consistent with, and apparently modeled upon, J. G. Fichte’s theory of the self. But Anti-Climacus takes issue with one central element of that account when he claims that, in relating to itself, the self must at the same time relate to a power that posited it. What Fichte meant by the claim that the self must view itself as absolutely self-positing is controversial, but he seems to have meant at least that it must see itself as self-determining (projecting its own ends and determining itself by action on them) and as self-legislating (being the source not only of its actual ends but of the norms that govern their adoption). It has appeared to many readers of the early Wissenschaftslehre that Fichte also thought of the self as ontologically sui generis, and that he explained the apparent facticity of agency by appeal to the unconscious character of the empirical self’s origin in the absolute I. In denying that the self is self-positing, Anti-Climacus surely means to reject the third claim. But equally important for the project in The Sickness unto Death is his rejection of the second. The self is not the source of the laws that govern it, and so in reflecting on its own activity, it must orient itself towards (or away from) a standard that has its source in a power outside of it. This relation can take a number of forms, including any number of construals of the nature of that power (and including even the denial that there is any such power). The analysis of despair in the first half of The Sickness unto Death is a catalogue of ways to fail to achieve an adequate conception of one’s own self hood. Despair has one unconscious form (not recognizing that one is a self to begin with) and two conscious forms: not wanting (or willing) to be oneself, and wanting (or willing) to be oneself.36 These correspond to three ways of misconstruing one’s agency: failing to see oneself as an agent to begin with (unconscious despair); failing to take responsibility for oneself and one’s actions (aesthetic despair); or aspiring to take total control of oneself and to be not only self-directing, but also self-legislating (ethical despair).37 These limitation of finitude? . . . Let all the dialecticians convene—they will not be able to decide this for a particular individual in concreto.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, VII: 426; 1997–, 7: 444) 35 

S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 127; 1997–, 11: 129. See, respectively, S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 154–8; 1997–, 11: 157–62, S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 161–78; 1997–, 11: 165–81, and S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 178–85; 1997–, 11: 181–7. 37  I argue for this reading in M. Kosch 2006b, 200–9. Of the alternative readings, most influential has been Theunissen (1991 and 1993), according to which The Sickness unto Death is an exercise in depthpsychology aimed at uncovering the sources of despair viewed as an affective state, and constructing a theory of the self based on that account of the pathologies to which it is subject. This reading is selfconsciously revisionist: it can account for only one form of despair (that of not wanting to be oneself), must ignore the claim that the theory of the self’s pathology is based on the theory of the self (rather than the other way round), and cannot account for the second part of the book at all. Other interpreters understand despair as failure to live up to the personal ethical task that has been set for one by God. These 36 

146   Michelle Kosch do not exhaust the options (as they might appear to); it is possible to be a self free of despair.38 Something like this account of agency is presupposed in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s most sustained meditation on the phenomenology of freedom. The premise of that work is that the possibility of a basic plurality of outcomes (good and evil) must correspond to something in the phenomenology of agency, and that something (whatever it is) must be what makes a choice of sin a psychological possibility. This is the role Kierkegaard proposes for anxiety.39 These two moral psychological works present a positive picture of the human agent corresponding to the characterizations of the aesthetic, ethical, and immanent-religious standpoints as somehow inadequate to the situation of existing subjectivity. This description of the situation and perspective of human agency was what drew twentieth century phenomenologists like the early Heidegger and Sartre to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, and echoes of his accounts of anxiety and of subjectivity more generally are clearly discernible in Being and Time and Being and Nothingness. Kierkegaard’s influence in Anglo-American philosophy, by contrast, has come primarily through philosophers of religion, for whom Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the posthumously published On Authority and Revelation, and above all Fear and Trembling have been most significant.40 More recently, scholars have begun to focus on works Kierkegaard published under his own name; Works of Love (1847) in particular has received much recent attention.41 Finally, Kierkegaard’s method, his use of pseudonymity and of what he called “indirect communication,” has drawn the sustained interest of both philosophers and literary theorists.42

Bibliography Adams, Robert M. (1982), “Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion,” in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, ed. S. Cahn and D. Shatz, Oxford University Press, New York, 213–28. Adams, Robert M. (1987), “Vocation,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 4, 448–62. readings make sense of the announcement that “despair is sin” with which the second part of the book is introduced, but they also fail to account for all three forms of despair described in the first part. The conscious despair of wanting to be oneself is a sticking point on both approaches, and to make sense of it one must take seriously Anti-Climacus’ claim that there can be the forms of despair described because the self is an agent that has its source of norms outside itself. “If a human self had itself established itself, then there could only be one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 128; 1997–, 11: 130) 38 

See, for example, S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, XI: 128; 1997–, 11: 130. Anxiety’s ambiguity (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 314, 316, 338, 343, 377; 1997–, 4: 349, 350, 372, 378, 411) suggests that it is that state of “restless repose . . . out of which sin constantly arises” (S. Kierkegaard 1901–6, IV: 294; 1997–, 4: 329). 40  In addition to works cited in the footnotes, see B. Blanshard 1974 ch. 6, C. S. Evans 1983, and S. Walsh 2008. 41  See, for example, J. Ferreira 2001 and C. S. Evans 2004. 42  Among philosophers, the focus here has been on the meaning of religious language, and whether it can have meaning for non-believers (see e.g. S. Cavell 1976 ch. 6), the question of whether there can be “significant nonsense” (see e.g. J. Conant 1989 and 1993; J. Lippitt and D. Hutto 1998), and what Kierkegaard means by “indirect communication” (a question to which there have been a variety of approaches—see e.g. P. Lübcke 1990 and R. Poole 1993). For a survey of twentieth-century receptions of Kierkegaard, see R. Poole 1998. 39 

Kierkegaard (1813–1855)   147 Blanshard, Brand (1974), Reason and Belief, Allen & Unwin, London. Cavell, Stanley (1976), Must we Mean What we Say?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Conant, James (1989), “Must we Show what we Cannot Say?,” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. R. Fleming and M. Payne, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, PA. Conant, James (1993), “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense,” in Pursuits of Reason, Texas Tech, Lubbock, TX. Disse, Jörg (2000), “Autonomy in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” in Kierkegaard and Freedom, ed. J. Giles, Palgrave, New York, NY, 58–68. Evans, C. Stephen (1981), “Is the Concept of an Absolute Duty toward God Morally Unintelligible?” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals, ed. R. Perkins, University of Alabama Press, University, AL, 141–51. Evans, C. Stephen (1983), Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Evans, C. Stephen (2004), Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Fahrenbach, Helmut (1968), Kierkegaards existenzdialektische Ethik, Klostermann, Frankfurt/Main. Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001), Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Oxford University Press, New York. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1971), Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte, de Gruyter, Berlin. Fujino, Hiroshi (1994), “Kontemplativ-ästhetisch oder existentiell-ethisch: zur Kritik der auf der Stadienlehre basierenden Kierkegaardinterpretation,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 17, 66–82. Green, Ronald M. (1998), “‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. A. Hannay and G. Marino, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 257–581. Greve, Wilfred (1990), Kierkegaards maieutische Ethik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main. Hamann, Johann Georg (1821–43), Schriften, ed. F. Roth, Reimer, Berlin. Hannay, Alastair (1982), Kierkegaard, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, MA. Hume, D. (1999), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Clarendon, Oxford. Kant, Immanuel (1968), Werke, Akademie Textausgabe, ed. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, de Gruyter, Berlin. Kosch, Michelle (2006a), “ ‘Despair’ in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 44, no. 1, 85–97. Kosch, Michelle (2006b), Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard, Clarendon, Oxford. Kosch, Michelle (2006c), “Kierkegaard’s Ethicist: Fichte’s Role in Kierkegaard’s Construction of the Ethical Standpoint,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 88, 261–95. Kosch, Michelle (2008), “What Abraham Couldn’t Say,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol. 82, 59–78. Kierkegaard, Søren (1901–6), Samlede Værker, eds. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange, Gyldendal, Copenhagen. Kierkegaard, Søren (1909–78), Papirer, ed. N. Thulstrup, Gyldendal, Copenhagen. Kierkegaard, Søren (1997–), Skrifter, eds. N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Knudsen, J. Kondrup, and A. McKinnon, Gad, Copenhagen. Lippitt, John and Daniel Hutto (1998), “Making Sense of Nonsense:  Kierkegaard and Witgenstein,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 98, 263–86. Lippitt, John (2003), Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, Routledge, New York, NY. Lübcke, Poul (1984), “Selvets ontologi hos Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13, 50–62. Lübcke, Poul (1990), “Kierkegaard and Indirect Communication,” History of European Ideas, vol. 12, no. 1, 31–40.

148   Michelle Kosch Lübcke, Poul (1991), “An Analytical Interpretation of Kierkegaard as Moral Philosopher,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 93–103. Mehl, P. (1995), “Moral Virtue, Mental Health and Happiness:  the Moral Psychology of Kierkegaard’s Judge Wilhelm,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or Part II, ed. R. Perkins, Mercer University Press, Macon, GA, 155–82. Pojman, Louis (1984), The Logic of Subjectivity, University of Alabama Press, University, AL. Poole, Roger 1993, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA. Poole, Roger (1998), “The unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-century receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay and G. Marino, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 48–75. Rudd, Anthony (1993), Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Clarendon, Oxford. Schellenberg, J. L. (1993), Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Taylor, Mark (1975), Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Theunissen, Michael (1991), Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Anton Hain, Frankfurt/Main. Theunissen, Michael (1993), Der Begriff Verzweiflung: Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main. Whittaker, J. H. (1988), “Suspension of the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 14, 101–13.

Chapter 8

M a r x (1818–1883) Michael Quante 8.1 Introduction Starting from the Left Hegelian context that had formative influence on Marx’s thought, this chapter offers an explication of the basic concepts and the central claims of Marx’s philosophical anthropology as they are presented in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and of the evaluative aspects of his philosophy as a theory of human recognition as presented in his comments on James Mill’s Élémens d’économie politique.1 In a further step, the conception of a materialistic philosophy of history, as Marx and Engels sketched it in the German Ideology, will be portrayed as an elaboration of that same philosophical anthropology. Finally, against this background, I will present the core elements of the Marxian programme of a critique of political economy, as Marx advanced it in Capital. Although Marx understood his own theoretical programme as a departure from philosophy, the core of his thought can be reconstructed as philosophical. Even though his thinking undergoes numerous turns and changes over the decades, on the fundamental conceptual level there is a continuity of central philosophical theses and figures of thought. These two premises are justified by the account presented in the following, since they allow the inner coherence of Marx’s theory to be grasped. At the centre of this effort lies an attempt to define Marx’s philosophy as a critical philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Hegel’s philosophy.

8.2  The Left Hegelian Background After Hegel’s death in 1831, his disciples were all of the opinion that the cycle of philosophy had come to a close and that the task from then on would consist only in finalizing those parts of the philosophical system that had been left uncompleted. But soon after, infighting

1 

Marx used a French translation of Mills Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821).

150   Michael Quante within this school set in with regard to the issue of the relationship between religion and philosophy in Hegel. I shall now present an account of some figures of thought in the Left Hegelian debates that were central for Marx (Breckman 1999; Moggach 2014). In 1830 Ludwig Feuerbach published anonymously a treatise entitled Thoughts on Death and Immortality (Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit), in which he answered the question raised by Hegel about the systematic possibility of an individual immortal soul in the negative. Hegel’s philosophy was therewith rendered incompatible with central doctrines of Christianity. The disputes about Hegel’s philosophy of religion were exacerbated by the publication of the book The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu) in 1835. In this tract, David Friedrich Strauß interprets the gospels as literary products and embellishments of the expectations of salvation of the primitive Early Christian community, and thus as products of a collective consciousness. The divine consciousness could not, he argues, manifest itself in a single empirical subject, but only in the congregation and ultimately in humanity as such. This figure of thought, irreconcilable as it is with the orthodox conception of Jesus as the Son of God, ran through Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach and had some influence on Marx’s idea of the proletariat as the human species’ consciousness of freedom coming into its own (Moggach 2003; Leopold 2007). This discourse in the philosophy of religion always had a political dimension to it. Thus the destruction of Christian doctrines was aimed directly at the religious legitimization of the monarchy. The question concerning God’s personality and the Christian conception of the person was at once directed towards the structure of continuously developing civil society. Feuerbach and Bauer construed the Christian idea of an individual personality as an ideological expression of an egoistic lifestyle that ignored man’s social bonds. This connection, too, was to become crucial to Marx’s anthropology. August von Cieszkowski’s treatise Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) expresses the view that gained strength among Hegelians, according to which historical progress and political change are not attainable through philosophical analysis and enlightenment, but only by way of a kind of societal practice. Cieszkowski took this to be the task of philosophy and demanded a ‘Philosophy of Action’ (‘Philosophie der Tat’). He holds that the shortcomings of Hegel’s philosophy are due to the present historical development. This is a thought that would resound in Marx’s conception of philosophy and his understanding of Hegelian dialectics. According to Cieszkowski, this philosophy of action should be capable of determining only the outlines of future developments and not the details. Based on a historical interpretation of the gospels, Bruno Bauer developed ever more fundamental forms of critique of religion. He ultimately claimed that all religious convictions as well as religious forms of thought and argumentation were absurd, and manoeuvred himself into a rigorously atheistic worldview, according to which religion must subordinate itself to the state and could no longer serve as an authority for political legitimization. He considered Christianity to be a historically obsolete and irrational form of consciousness that needed to be replaced by his own democratically oriented method of critique. It is characteristic of Bauer to have pursued the progressive critique aimed at democracy as a philosophy of religion. The guiding idea behind this project is the assumption leading back from Hegel to Fichte that the ultimate authority of philosophical enlightenment is self-consciousness in its absolute freedom. This is accompanied by a transformation of Hegelian dialectics into a theory of the accentuation of opposites and the annihilation of previous social systems and systems of thought. Whereas in the

Marx (1818–1883)   151 mature Hegelian system, dialectics meant primarily mediation and integration, in which the negated steps were retained as sublated steps of development, Bauer conceives dialectic sublation as a spiral movement through crisis or even catastrophe. This figure of thought also influences Marx’s understanding of socio-historical processes and Hegel’s dialectics. The fundamental principle of Bauer’s philosophy is not individual self-consciousness, but a kind of species being. This idea is retained in Feuerbach as well as—albeit in once more altered form—in Marx. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s approach, both the critique of religion and the critique of idealism and Hegel play a central role. The main motif of these critical efforts, which were to assume great significance for Marx, lies in interpreting the content of religious ideas as externalizations of humanity that project both the properties and capabilities that are not realized in the present social system and the needs that are unsatisfied in society onto an ideal counterpart: a transcendent God. According to Feuerbach’s theory of estrangement, philosophical enlightenment concerning this mechanism suffices to eradicate the roots of estrangement (Brudney 1998). Like Marx and other Left Hegelians, Feuerbach equates philosophy and idealism because Hegel’s absolute idealism is regarded as the culmination of all philosophy. Feuerbach replaces philosophy with a philosophical anthropology that has strong empirical traits. This anthropology had a lasting effect on Marx’s philosophy and it can at the same time be viewed as one of the central points that triggered Marx’s departure from Bauer’s thought and from his own views prior to 1843. With Feuerbach, the highest authority of philosophical critique is no longer self-consciousness, but the human being conceived as an entity comprised of body and mind. This position retains the idea that this essence of the human being reveals itself not in its individuality but in its species dimension. A further motif that was to become decisive for Marx can be found cloaked in a critique of idealism within Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel. It contains two crucial elements that are presented in two tracts published in journals of the Left Hegelians in 1843, in Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). First, in contrast to Bauer’s writings of the years 1840 and 1842, Hegel’s philosophy is no longer viewed as atheism but as itself the ultimate form of theology and thus becomes the object of Feuerbach’s critique of religion. Secondly, Feuerbach charges Hegel with constantly interchanging subject and predicate. Hegel is interpreted as always understanding the independent (the actual subject) as a reflex (a mere predicate), whereas the actually dependent predicate is posited as the independent and moving force. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, published in 1843, Marx uses numerous Feuerbachian figures of thought for the first time; and in his uncompleted and unpublished Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts from the same period, he criticizes Hegel for conceiving of the idea and not of empirical subjects as the actual bearers of social and historical processes. Marx’s rejection of the Left Hegelians takes shape in stages from 1843 (when he turns towards Feuerbach’s anthropology and away from Bauer’s idealistic rationalism) to 1845 (with his explicit criticism of Feuerbach). Although Marx breaks allegiance with Bauer in his work The Jewish Question, with the Left Hegelian conception of social criticism in The Holy Family, co-authored with Engels, and with Feuerbach in German Ideology, also co-authored with Engels, the Left Hegelians made an important and lasting impact on Marxian thought.

152   Michael Quante

8.3  The Philosophical-Anthropological Conception The central claims and premises of the philosophical-anthropological conception presented in the Manuscripts can be grouped into three subject areas:  the objectification model of action, the conception of estrangement, and the conception of an objectual species being.

8.3.1  The Concept of Labour and Action The analysis of the objectification model as a theory of action has to form the centre of any interpretation of Marx. The model is developed most explicitly in a passage from the Manuscripts which the editors entitled ‘Estranged Labour’ (Manuscripts, 270–82): [T]‌he object which labour produces—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. (272)

Intentionality marks the specific difference between human and animal activity, which is why in Marx the objectification model is first and foremost a theory of intentional action. ‘Labour’ here takes on a threefold meaning: (i) as the end of the activity, (ii) as the process of being active, and (iii) as the result of the activity. One could also refer to the content sense, the process sense, and the result sense of ‘labour’. Schematically, the Marxian conception can be rendered as follows: (a) I intend to bring about the state of affairs p (through my doing a). (Content sense) (b) By doing a I bring about the state of affairs p. (Process sense) (c) The realization of this process of bringing about is the independent fact p, in which my activity has fulfilled itself. (Result sense) Assuming that the state of affairs and the fact p are identical, this makes for a plausible reconstruction of our pre-philosophical understanding of actions:  (c)  says that a fact p is independent of me. Act a is—as clause (b) has it—a causally necessary condition for p becoming an independent fact.

8.3.2  The Conception of Estrangement Marx explained this conception in detail only in the Manuscripts, and without explicitly defining the concept of estrangement (cf. MEW E I, 510–22). First, this omission is an expression of his self-assessment that he had moved on from the tasks of philosophy. Secondly, he borrows his central concept from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which he regarded as the ultimate and unsurpassable state of philosophy. And thirdly, there was,

Marx (1818–1883)   153 in Marx’ time, a widely established, but not specifically philosophical use of the term ‘estrangement’. So Marx could rely on the fact that the discourse about estrangement was accessible to his partners in the discussion. In his analysis, Marx proceeds from the social fact that the pauperization of workers was a systematic necessity under the national economic conditions of his time. The more social wealth they produce, the poorer they get. And the greater the potentials for power and knowledge, created by industry, technology, and science become for the human species, the more deprived do the proletarians become. For Marx the causes of this estrangement are the social institutions of private property in means of production and in wage labour. This claim is justified with reference to the objectification model, which is why Marx locates the origin of estrangement there. Under capitalist conditions, the worker does not possess the products of his work; they are the property of the capitalist. The worker has to purchase them with his wages; he has to succeed in selling his labour power in order for it to be activated in a production process: Without money, the products of his work recede into an unattainable distance. Since the means of production are private property, the worker cannot deploy his labour power autonomously in order to produce the things that are necessary for his existence because the means of production belong to others. The same holds for the products of his labour. According to Marx, capitalism stands for the total estrangement of the human being because the proletarians have completely estranged their human form of existence and sold their essence as species subject to the capital creating it as an ‘automatic subject’ (Capital, 255) thereby. The first dimension covered by the Marxian conception of estrangement concerns the relationship between the worker and the product of his work. According to the objectification model, the product is an object that is independent of human action, so that a social institution can enter between the activity and its product. Within capitalism it is the legal institution of private property. Marx locates the second dimension in the relationship between the worker and his activity. The objectification model implies the transfer of features of the act of producing to features of the product, so that this is revealed as a more original dimension of estrangement. Being estranged from one’s own activity consists, on Marx’ account, in two aspects: first, the worker experiences himself as heteronomous in his activity, and secondly, he feels miserable. The production process determines the goal of his activity, but the products of his work do not belong to him; the reason for his being active is the need to survive. Work is not a realisation of his essence, but only a means of survival. It is not the aim of his existence, but only a means of prolonging his physical deterioration. Marx identifies the estrangement of the human being from his species being as a third dimension; it is another core element of his philosophy (see section 8.1.3). In this context, he connects species being and labour by the premise that ‘the productive life is the life of the species’ (Manuscripts, 276). Capitalist society alienates the human being from his species being in two ways. As the realization of his species being confronts the individual as an inscrutable and dominating market, the single human being cannot identify with this objectification of the species. Due to the inhumane rule of the game, the worker only acquiesces in this social dimension of his existence to ensure his own survival. For him, work is not an exertion of his species being, but only a means to securing his individual livelihood. This third dimension of estrangement is the first means-end-inversion within the relationship between the individual and his species being. But the species being of the human being manifests itself not

154   Michael Quante only in the relation between the individual and the overall social context or the production sector, but also in the relationships among individuals. That is why the fourth dimension of estrangement is to be found there. As a species being capable of conscious activity, the single human being knows not only about his own needs, but also about those of other human individuals. In the context of the capitalist market, this constellation is inverted into a means-end-relation. A produces commodity x to sell it to B. The aim of this sale is to obtain money in order to satisfy one’s own needs. A knows about B’s needs, for otherwise he could not try to satisfy his own needs by producing and selling commodity x. B’s needs are, however, not the purpose for which A produces x and offers it to B; they are only the means A employs in order to be able to satisfy his own needs. Within A’s calculus, B’s neediness is just an indispensable bridge to the satisfaction of his own needs. As the single human being does not produce directly for the satisfaction of the needs of others, according to Marx he does not acknowledge the needs of the species being and thus he cannot realize his own species being: private property of means of production, the market, and wage labour do not permit the establishment of an interpersonal relationship within the production sector that can be considered as a realization of the human species being. The attempt to determine the relation between the third and the fourth dimensions of estrangement points to the problem of how Marx conceives the connection between the relationship between individual human being and species being, on the one hand, and the relationship among human individuals, on the other. For the third dimension is realized in and through the mutual relationship between individual human beings. The exact construction of the objectification model therewith becomes relevant: do not all aspects that can be found in the relation between a human being and his species being (e.g. as attributes of the species being) have to be conceivable as features of the individual actions by this particular human being? Or may some features of his species character be objectified through the actions of an individual, given that they are not part of his individual intention? Does it make a difference for the features of the product of an action whether the agent is described qua individual or qua species being? In the first case, all aspects of societal interactions must at once be aspects of the interaction between single individuals. If we require less strict dependence relations in this respect instead, we can fill the remaining margin with social institutions that create mediation between both spheres. Marx understood all instances of indirect reconciliation by means of representative institutions (be they the market, law, morality, or the state) as expressions of estrangement. His talk of immediacy is meant in the sense of the first option and designates the relationship between individual and species that is ontologically adequate for the human being. The question that is also crucial to Marx’s philosophy of history, that is, the question: ‘how is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development [?]‌’ (Manuscripts, 281), emphasizes that Marx is looking for an answer that enables estrangement to be regarded as a necessary stage in the development of the essence of the human being. For the human being is understood as an objectual species being that objectifies its essence in productive activity, which includes conscious activity in the sense of conscious appropriation of objectified characteristics of its species. The roots of this Marxian figure of thought lie in idealist philosophy (Moggach 2014). It was the aim of Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems to explicate how self-consciousness can come to know and bring about itself or its own essence. Marx

Marx (1818–1883)   155 replaces self-consciousness with the sensual-physical human being, and idealistically conceived conscious acts with the objectification model of action. The human being can only realize its species being by developing a consciousness thereof, which requires familiarity with the characteristics of his species as manifested in an object. For this to be true knowledge of the particular being’s own species being, the object must be an objectification of the human being’s species characteristics. For Marx this is the societal production complex. Herein lies the objectification and estrangement of the species powers:  capitalism is the endpoint of this estranged objectification. Once all species characteristics are carved out in this way, the human being can begin to put his species powers into practice through social revolutions. The initial state of the human being is by no means un-estranged, but pre-estranged and undifferentiated. In this state, the human being has not yet realized his species being, for he is not conscious of it. The estrangement that takes place in the process of objectification is the necessary intermediate step to allow for a conscious appropriation of the species being in a second step. In almost Hegelian terms: not the immediate initial state, but only the sublation of estrangement resulting from diremption is the realization of the human species being. For Hegel and Marx this is not regression to the initial state of undifferentiated immediacy. In contrast to formal logic, they treat the negation of negation as a productive process of development, learning, and formation: in the sublation of estrangement, the experience thereof must not be forgotten. The quality of sublated estrangement lies precisely in gaining knowledge of estrangement and its causes.

8.3.3  The Objectual Species Being The concept of estrangement factually depends not only on the objectification model of action and the idealist theory of self-consciousness; it also cannot be explicated without reference to the concept of species being, as this connects the first and the last two dimensions of estrangement (Archibald 1989). What does Marx mean by the claim that the human being is an objectual species being? Marx combines Feuerbach’s anthropology, Moses Hess’s vision of social unity, and Hegel’s objectification model of action. Together with Hegel, he adheres to the epistemological subject-object-model in conceiving of the necessity of estrangement. With Feuerbach, he accepts the individual anthropological and the theoretical dimension of the species being as a subordinate aspect of the primarily social species being. And with Hess, he criticizes private property in means of production, wage labour, and the existence of a constitutional state as expressions of estrangement that have to be superseded by consciously planned and rationally comprehended cooperation. Furthermore, Marx’s thought is radically historical in the sense of focusing on a necessary process of the unfolding of an essence, which occurs through crises and the emergence of antagonisms. This historical and social understanding of the species being is accompanied by the idea of the unity of matter and mind, which goes back to Hess. Marx views the human being as a part of nature that lives in and on it. At the same time, in the course of the self-realization of the species nature converges on the inorganic body of species being, transformed and appropriated by human agency; Marx regards society as ‘the complete unity of man with nature’ (Manuscripts, 298).

156   Michael Quante The metaphysical implications of Marx’s theory of species being can be assigned to three subject areas: essentialism, the social ontological relationships inherent therein, and the historico-philosophical dimension.

8.3.3.1 Essentialism The Marxian conceptions of species being and estrangement cannot be formulated without devising an essentialism that allows a distinction between the essential and inessential properties of entities. With regard to an entity that changes over time, such as the human species being, one can in addition distinguish between potential and actual properties. If A does not actually exhibit an essential property at a given point of time, then it has this property potentially, as it belongs to A’s essence. It is part of the human species being to have a concept of its own essence. Estrangement in the spheres of social and material realization involves false or distorted self-interpretations, which are also forms of estrangement. The two dimensions of estrangement are mutually dependent:  false self-interpretations can lead to spurious social relationships (or at least stabilize them), and spurious social conditions evoke flawed self-interpretations. Many interpret this anthropology as an ethical theory according to which the realization of the essence of the human being is immediately an ethically significant good. However, Marx does not explicitly commit to this Aristotelian principle. If essentialism could not be decoupled from ethical validity claims, his conception of estrangement would indeed commit him to an ethical theory. But there are two variants of essentialism that carry no ethical implication. A historico-philosophical essentialism conceives of historical processes as realizations of the essential properties of entities across time. Such a theory must be grounded in general metaphysical premises, but it does not necessarily require ethical premises. Scientistic essentialism is also free of ethical assumption if it is based on the purely ontological and methodological claim that the natural sciences can shed light on real things and their essential properties. These two forms of essentialism obviously fit in very well with some tendencies in Marx’s thought (Meikle 1985). Thus the interpretation of Marx’s conceptions of species being and estrangement in terms of an Aristotelian ethics is not without alternatives. As we will see in the following section, the Marxian conception contains other conceptual resources that render an ethical interpretation plausible.

8.3.3.2  The social ontological model The reference to the human species being inevitably raises the question of the relation between species and specimen that is associated with the conception at hand. In his account of estrangement, this relation is what is at issue in the distinction between the third and fourth dimensions of estrangement, and in light of a contemporary debate, Marx had reason to turn to this problem. In 1844 Stirner, Feuerbach, Bauer, and Hess quarrelled about the appropriate relationship between species and individual; the German Ideology was intended as a contribution to this debate because Stirner’s two-tiered critique also applies to the conception presented in the Manuscripts. First, Stirner shows that Feuerbach’s anthropology, Bauer’s theory of self-consciousness, and the conceptions of history and the social advocated

Marx (1818–1883)   157 in socialism are all still idealistic, and that they thereby fall behind their own aspirations. This he assumes to be evident from the fact that, secondly, all these conceptions introduce an item that transcends the human individual: the human being qua species, self-consciousness qua universal, or the social community. Stirner holds that contrary to the self-understanding and the intentions of Feuerbach, Bauer, or Hess this leads to tutelage of the individual, to heteronomy and oppression. The single, unique, and autonomous human individual (Stirner’s ‘Ego’) would then be a mere instance or specimen whose norm of existence is prescribed to him.

8.3.3.3  Philosophy of history In his work The Ego and His Own, Stirner rejects any philosophy of history as ethically unacceptable. He maintains that the single individual could be subsumed under the species on behalf of a philosophically justified progress that aims at the realization of the species’ essence in the distant future. One could even ignore the objectively justified critique voiced by individuals against factually given social structures by pointing to the necessity of historical progression. There are evident dangers in a philosophy of history that justifies, accepts, or even arouses present suffering and misery in anticipation of a bright future. These dangers also confront Marx with a significant problem, for history is ineliminably incorporated in his conceptions of estrangement and species being. This necessity results from the objectification model of action, which also guides Marx’s account of the acquisition of knowledge and self-knowledge. In the background is the essentialist premise according to which the human species being aims at a self-realization that due to the universal character of the human being includes the insight into its own essence (Wood 1981). But in so far as the human being can only have insight into his own essence if he actively externalizes it and thus makes it an object for itself, externalization is a necessary part of self-realization. At the same time, this necessarily opens up the possibility that this externalization will turn into estrangement if the adequate self-realization and self-knowledge through externalization is unsuccessful.

8.4  Human Recognition Marx’s species metaphysics encompasses an account of recognition that has both a socialontological and an ethical function (Quante 2011). In a first step, I shall now develop the role of recognition as a critical standard of assessment, before then, in a second step, designating it as the core of Marx’s ethical counter-project.

8.4.1  Recognition as Critical Background In the Excerpts, Marx works on the assumption that money is the estranged objectification of the species being. In virtue of this reification (i.e. the transfer of properties from the activity to the product) ‘man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a

158   Michael Quante power independent of him and them’ (Excerpts, 212). Marx at once formulates the positive side of the contrast: ‘instead of man himself being the mediator for man’ (Excerpts, 212). Furthermore he transfers the Feuerbachian critique of religion to economic circumstances under conditions of division of labour, private property, and wage labour. In so doing, he provides the following analysis of estranged recognition under these conditions (Excerpts, 212, 225–7): A and B independently produce P1 and P2, exchange their products directly and for their own respective consummation. Since at the outset the situation is symmetrical, Marx takes up and illustrates A’s perspective: A produces P1 with the intention not to consume P1 himself, but to exchange it for P2; he wants to purchase P2 to satisfy his own need and he wants B to exchange P2 for P1. In this situation, A believes that B needs P1 and that B will hand P2 over to him if B obtains P1 from A. Consequently, A gives P1 to B precisely with the intention of retrieving P2 for the satisfaction of his own needs. In the second step, A swaps with B, although B’s need for P1 is not the goal of A’s action. The fact that B needs P1 is what A believes, but it is not his volition. In this exchange, A recognizes B only as the owner of P2 and not as a being with a justified need for P1. The fact that B needs P1 is not a motive for A to give P1 to B. A’s sole motive is rather to purchase P2 for the satisfaction of his own need. A produced P1—in anticipation of the exchange—solely with the intention of using it as a means to the satisfaction of his own need for P2. The fact that B has a need for P1 is still a necessary precondition assumed by A for the realization of that intention, but it does not let B’s neediness become the motive for A’s production. Marx goes on to analyse the situation as follows: there is no immediate relationship between P2 and A, because P2 belongs to B and can only be obtained by A through exchange. P1 is a production by the owner A for the owner B, and not a production by the human species being A for the human species being B. The species being of the human being would only be realized if both made the other’s neediness the goal of their respective production. Then the interaction between A and B, who mutually realize their essence through the satisfaction of the other’s need for the sake of that neediness, would have been an objectification of the human essence. Here, Marx draws on the following Feuerbachian premise: If A has a need for x, then x is part of A’s essence. Thus if A needs something B produces, then B’s production is part of the realization of A’s essence. The human species being is only realized through social interaction at the level of material reproduction, which is, however, not attained in the exchange situation, as there is as yet no mutual recognition of the other’s neediness as a goal of production and exchange. On the basis of his objectification model, Marx quashes the objection that in exchange (or in other forms of collective action) something could be objectified that is irreducible to the intentions of the agents involved. This point is directed against Hegel’s interpretation of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ and amounts to the view that within Marx’s objectification model collective action must be reducible to the intentions of the individual agents. The form that is realized in the medium of exchange is inadequate to the human species being, even though the constitutive neediness exists here, too. As neediness it is an expression of the human species being, but in the estranged state of exchange this bond of essence is perverted by instrumentalization and heteronomy: if A produces P1 with the goal of getting P2, then P1 is not the actual goal of A’s activity (which is why A becomes estranged in this activity). And B, B’s activity and neediness are only further means employed by A to get P2. There is an interleaving between the intentions and actions of A and B that can

Marx (1818–1883)   159 factually function only if A and B participate in the human species being, that is, if they cannot realize their own essence without the other. But, thereby, A and B are aiming only at their individual utility, which they want to realize as extensively and as easily as possible. Therefore, Marx holds, the structure of this form of cooperation implies that A and B want to overreach one another. What looks like cooperation for mutual benefit is actually an instrumentalization of the other for the purpose of attaining one’s own advantage. In the exchange, A and B recognize one another as private owners of their respective products, so that B is free not to exchange his product for A’s. This is why A’s strategy can only be successful if B factually recognizes the power of P1 by consenting to the exchange, because he needs P1 for the satisfaction of his need. As this recognition in the exchange occurs on both sides, the strategy of mutual overreaching is a struggle for recognition: A struggles for B’s recognition of A’s product (and vice versa). Here, Marx is employing the Hegelian figure of the struggle for recognition in order to analyse the estranged–estranging interaction between A and B. In doing so, he not only grasps the perspectives of those involved, but also reconstructs the overall structure of the interaction. This struggle for recognition is a symmetric relation for whose function it is irrelevant which of the two protagonists holds the upper hand (or whether they exchange equivalents, which is also a possible outcome). What is structurally characteristic according to Marx is the indirectness of the social interaction that comes about through the products to be exchanged and, as their source, through A’s and B’s respective acts of production. Without neediness there would be no exchange, but B’s neediness is not A’s motive for producing and giving away P1; the only motive is the goal of obtaining P2 for the satisfaction of his own need. If C, who also needs P1 but has no product to offer, were to ask A for P1 just because he (i.e. C) has the respective need, then this would be a breach of the rules. Marx analyses the psychic consequences of C’s request under the conditions that A and C orient themselves to the grammar of private property. C has to come down and cannot act as an equal, independent and free supplier or demander. He cannot for himself fulfil the norms he recognizes. A will see C’s request as an infringement and as an impertinence because he is being asked to forgo the pursuit of his personal interest, which is the primary motive of his production. Actually, as Marx puts it in anticipation of his own ethical conception, the dignity of a human being lies in the fact that neediness is recognized for its own sake and that the other’s neediness becomes an immediate motive for interaction. Under the circumstances of private property and exchange it is, however, perverted into its opposite. Dignity lies precisely in the independence of being an owner and a market player, and the moral achievement lies in not being ‘pulled over the barrel’ by an exchange partner because of one’s own neediness, that is, not making oneself subservient to one’s own needs. Marx emphasizes this aspect in an explicit allusion to Hegel’s concept of recognition. The social relationship between lordship and slavery counts as a first, rough manifestation of this self-relationship and is characterized by the constellation that the two functions of being means and end are distributed unilaterally to A and B as social roles. Marx wants to show that the abolition of slavery within a legal order is only the sublation of a form of appearance of this contradictory self-relationship, and by no means a resolution of the contradiction itself. For within the legal framework of exchange, the conflict-laden roles of master and slave are only internalized into the respective self-relationships of A and B, but they are not abolished. Blatant slavery is refined, but essentially preserved in the legal circumstances of private property, wage labour, and exchange.

160   Michael Quante For Marx, the seeming sublation of social injustice through the development of private property and law (as well as morality, the state, etc.) is only an ‘ideological’ sublation that does not reach to the core or the origin of the actual contradiction, which Marx interprets as estrangement. Internalization can thus not be a sublation in the sense of an ethically adequate self-distancing and (partial) self-instrumentalization, the stabilization of which requires ethics, morality, law, political institutions, and media of cultural self-interpretation such as art, religion or philosophy (where this is ultimately Hegel’s reply). Instead, Marx has to call for a sublation of this self-estrangement in the immediate activity of A and B as well as in their direct interaction. As we shall see, this forms the core of the positive counter-utopia Marx sketches subsequent to this analysis of estranged circumstances.

8.4.2  Recognition as a Positive Counter Project Many passages in the Manuscripts can be read as an ethical argument if one understands the emphasis on nature and the essentialism regarding the species being along the lines of an Aristotelian ethics that centres on the realization of an essence (Wood 1981). However, this reading does not capture the full extent of Marx’s position. To determine the basic ethical categories adequately, one must have recourse to the concept of recognition. This becomes plainest in view of the famous passage from the end of the Excerpts (pp. 227f.), in which Marx sketches a utopian counter project. In a succeeding interaction, A helps B to realize B’s species being, is recognized by B as this mediator, and knows that B recognizes him as such. A thereby objectifies his own species being in B’s recognition and makes it the object of his consciousness. A helps B to realize B’s individuality, so that A can realize his individual essence and his species being in this activity. This holds on condition that B really appreciates A’s product and provides the recognition A anticipates. Under the further condition that the interaction is one of symmetric mutuality, B also realizes his human essence. In analysing this structure of recognition, Marx contrasts the succeeding constellation with the one explicated before, which centres on an exchange action under conditions of private property and market. His counter-proposal encompasses the ontological thesis that a single individual cannot realize its species being, but is dependent on the constitutive contribution of an other or all others. This ontological bond of unity is realized in a non-estranged co-production: A knows and senses B to be a necessary part of his (i.e. A’s) own essence. This realization of an essence requires not only a causal connection but, with regard to the level of (self-)interpretation, also the proper attitude of those involved in social cooperation: recognition of the other as a human being and creature of needs as well as bearer of one’s own needs, and of love as an expression of the recognition that the other makes the realization of one’s own species being possible through his activity. A’s and B’s acts of production and consumption are necessary elements of the adequate realization of the species being, which Marx characterizes solely negatively as the absence of means-end-perversion and mediation by private property, market, and wage labour. Thus in addition to the ontological dimension of mutual dependence as moments of the objectual species being that realizes itself in production, the implicitly ethical norm of the adequate individual perspective is found in this ontological dimension as well as in the proper

Marx (1818–1883)   161 attitude towards the needs of others. At the same time, the symmetry requirement can be referred to as the basis of the intersubjective validity of these claims, which is grounded in the ontological interconnection between individuals in respect of their species nature. Hence there is an ethical theory inscribed in Marx’s species metaphysics: the proper ethical consciousness of the individuals is necessary for an adequate realization of their species being.

8.5  The Materialistic Philosophy of History This overall conception with its action-theoretic and epistemological assumptions includes a philosophy of history: historical materialism (Cohen 2001). For Marx, the question of the necessary origin of estrangement, which is left open in the account of estrangement, must be answered in such a way that it evades Stirner’s accusation of being metaphysical. Marx develops the outlines of his philosophy of history in the first chapter of the German Ideology (of which we will, for stylistic reasons, treat him as the sole author). He stresses that any theory of history must takes its cue from cooperating human beings and social interaction. He identifies three essential elements of historical development: the productive force, the circumstances in society, and consciousness. Marx holds that at any given moment of its development every society is characterized by a specific historical form of development with regard to these three basic elements and through a specific form of societal self-interpretation and self-organization (in legal, moral, political, or religious, that is, in ideological forms). Here, production refers to two social situations, namely the individuals’ self-preservation by means of labour and the reproduction of the species. In Marx’s view this account of history differs from the idealist account in that human consciousness is regarded neither as the first, nor as the primary factor, nor even as one that is independent from other factors. However, it remains relevant even in the materialist model of history, although it is a phenomenon influenced by the physical makeup of the human being and his environment as well as being socially mediated. To make it plausible why this consciousness can become a motor of historical change, Marx emphasizes the relevance of a fundamental fact: ‘the division of labour’ (Ideology, 51). Marx takes the circumstances in civil society based on the division of labour—in connection with private property—to be one of the most important factors in explaining the estrangement of the human being. He points to a qualitative difference in the process of advancing the division of labour, which explains why the human consciousness becomes a causally relevant factor of social change. Once the separation of material and intellectual labour is completed, the consciousness that is hived off in this way must be taken into account by the theory as a third, though non-autonomous item in the explanation of historical change. Which causal role consciousness takes in the course of history depends on the specific constellation of productive force and the given circumstances in society. Whereas this claim does not determine the precise causal role of consciousness, it does delimit its scope. The primordial division of labour that stems from the biological constitution of the human being explains why consciousness can take itself to be autonomous. According to Marx’s concept of history, historical events are human actions that bring forth something new in the sense of a change in the overall constellation of civil society

162   Michael Quante beyond the change of generations; and the coming about of these actions can be explained with reference to the three elements he identifies. Marx develops an empirically informed philosophy of history that is adjusted to historical and scientifically ascertainable facts, and which is compatible with his account of estrangement and his metaphysics of the species being (Cohen 2001). In developing the outline of his account of history, Marx is also concerned with answering the question of the necessary origin of estrangement. To close this explanatory gap in his account of estrangement he invokes anthropological and biological aspects that are at any rate contingent and empirically testable. But does he succeed in evading Stirner’s critique? In the context of his dissociation from the idealist philosophy of history, by way of replying to Stirner’s fundamental critique Marx explains that every deep philosophical problem dissolves into an empirical fact. However, since he is interested in evidence for the necessity of estrangement, he cannot pay attention to all aspects of Stirner’s critique. So Marx is reliant on rejecting this critique offensively by attacking its premises. This is why, first, he applies himself to the proof that Stirner’s reconstruction of history is itself adherent to idealistic philosophy of history. In extensive analyses, Marx tries to show that Stirner cannot adequately account for empirical facts in his philosophy of history. Stirner’s theory thus falls under his own and Marx’s criticism. Second, Marx takes up objections that Feuerbach and Hess already put forth against Stirner’s critique of the paternalism of substantialist thought: Stirner’s I is, so the objection goes, a philosophical construct that does not do justice to the empirically describable human being. Thus Marx rejects the norm implicit in Stirner’s critique and points out that this norm—as a philosophical construction—is not only empirically implausible but also generates paternalistic effects. Marx’s conception of history can explain why consciousness can become an independent factor and take itself to be autonomous. The resulting beliefs guide human action and, Marx holds, lead to the formation of social institutions in which mediation between these ideological self-interpretations and the real social preconditions is intended. The Marxian critique of morality, law, and state as central mediating institutions is understandable within this account of history and against the background of his metaphysics of the species being. In his positive utopia of the immediate recognition of individuals and in the explication of the account of recognition as a critical standard for the division of labour and exchange, Marx tends to view every (self-)interpretation of human individuals, in which they are thought of as occupants of social roles, as undue particularization and negation of the human individual in its totality and individual uniqueness, and as a symptom of estrangement. Consequently, Marx must understand all institutions and media of interpretation, in which these particularizations (functions, social roles, etc.) are objectified as phenomena of estrangement that need to be overcome. The utopia of immediate, dialogical recognition thus matches his account of history, his account of estrangement, and his critique of morality, law, and the state. It cannot be said with certainty how far Marx’s critique of morality extends, since successful recognition implies evaluative-normative attitudes in non-estranged circumstances, so there must be adequate evaluative-normative attitudes (of altruism and love). The Marxian critique of morality is possibly only aimed at certain forms of morality (Wood 1981). At any rate, his critique of morality, law, and the state remains problematic:  the utopia of the rationally transparent planning of all social cooperation and the demand of exclusively altruistically motivated interaction constitute an evaluative-normative

Marx (1818–1883)   163 standard that can be criticized with good reason from a philosophical standpoint in view of its overly demanding effects.

8.6  The Programme of a Critique of Political Economy In what follows, I  shall interpret the critique of political economy as a philosophical account. Marx sets about his critique of capitalist society with the analysis of commodity and the development of his account of value. As an external object, the commodity is a useful thing; Marx calls this usefulness the utility-value of the commodity. The utility-value is to be understood as a relation between the natural properties of things and human needs. In capitalism, commodities belong to private persons who produce independently of one another and satisfy their own needs by way of exchange. In this exchange, utility-values are ‘the material bearers’ (Capital, 126) of the exchange-value. With respect to the commodity, Marx distinguishes between the utility-value and the exchange-value, where the latter is value in a specific guise. Value as such must appear in different forms that depend on the respective structure of social organization. In contrast to the utility-value, the exchange-value is not a natural property of the commodity. It appears, unlike the utility-value that realizes itself in consummation, ‘as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind’ (Capital, 126). Marx interprets the equation (e.g. m commodity x = n commodity y) in such a way that both exchange-values are reducible to a ‘third thing’ (Capital, 127)  that is distinct from them. This is their value, and the exchange-value is its specific guise within capitalism. Marx introduces the exchange-value as an item that is constituted by social interaction. Since agents disregard the utility-values in the exchange, the only joint feature that remains is, according to Marx, that they are products of labour. And because in the equalization there is abstraction from the respective specific activity (e.g. of manufacturing a table or baking bread), this joint feature must be ‘abstract human labour’ (Capital, 129) that has objectified itself in the commodities. The core thesis of Marx’s theory of value is that labour is the substance of value. This value, and with it the objectified, abstract, socially necessary labour, manifests itself in exchange processes; it only appears in acts of exchange, but in being the identical behind the appearances it forms the substance to which the equals sign of the act of exchange implicitly refers. But the agents of exchanges do not consciously bring about the reduction of goods to their exchange-value and, together with this, of concrete labour to abstract, socially necessary average labour; rather, it is a philosophical theorem. Marx’s account entails two philosophical difficulties. On the one hand, he views the connection between abstract labour and exchange-value as a case of objectification. He understands the value of a commodity as a socially constituted fact and determines value and exchange-value, in contrast to natural properties, as a supernatural fact that is entirely constituted in and by society. This brings into play an aspect that cannot be accommodated adequately in the objectification model because this model relies on the social act of exchange. On the other hand, Marx’s account entails an ontologization of the

164   Michael Quante contradiction that cannot be eliminated without at the same time renouncing a constitutive aspect of the entire account, that is, his claim about the primacy of production. The following statement is thus to be taken literally: The commodity is immediate unity of utility-value and exchange value, hence (it is the unity) of two opposites. It is thus an immediate contradiction. (Kapital, 51)

This immediate contradiction provides the theory-immanent reason for the further development of Marx’s analysis, since it must ‘develop’ (Kapital, 51) into the exchange process. Instead of ignoring this finding, one can reconstruct these statements in terms of the intentions of the participants in the exchange, who refer to the commodities as utility- and exchange-values. In this sense, A must abstract from the use-value of his commodity x if he offers it to B in exchange (and B performs the same abstraction regarding his commodity y). The perspective of the two parties to the exchange thereby denotes the use-value as negated and the exchange-value as an abstract factor constituted precisely by this act of abstraction. Marx introduces money into his theory by way of a further development of the elementary exchange action that is interpreted as an exchange of equivalents. Since in principle every commodity can be exchanged for every other one, one can determine a universal form of value that serves to contrast a given quantum of a given commodity on one side of the equation with all other commodities, with which it is exchangeable, on the other. From this point it is no far stretch to the introduction of money, as in fact this signalized commodity already serves as a universal point of reference for expressing the value or exchange-value of all other commodities. Marx himself saw clearly that the crucial premises of his theory reside not in his definition of money, but in his analysis of commodity and the form of value. Nevertheless, with respect to the process of the societal adhesion of a commodity into the form of money, a decisive process can be illustrated which Marx describes as the fetish character of the commodity. Through ‘social custom’ (Capital, 162)  a specific commodity, for example, gold, acquires the property of being the universal equivalent of all commodities. In contrast to the property of having use-value, this property is social or supernatural. At the same time, to the agents it seems like a natural property of gold. They do not realize that the property of functioning as money is not an intrinsic property of gold but a social fact. Since the specific nature of money can be traced back to the commodity-form, Marx transfers this state of affairs of fetishism back to the dual character of commodity and farther to the dual character of labour as concretely and abstractly socially necessary average labour that is objectified in the commodity. It is this last point that is referred to by Marx as ‘fetishism’: social relations between producers appear as relations between commodities, more generally:  between things. Marx identifies this reification of the social as the specific character of commodity production, understood as the ‘labour of private individuals’ (Capital, 165), and thus of the capitalist formation of society. So this theorem also fits into his analysis of the estranged objectification of the species being in capitalist circumstances: in capitalism, the human species being is only realized in the market of commodity exchange. The production of the commodity itself is a private matter, the product is private property, the intention of producing is aimed at one’s own satisfaction

Marx (1818–1883)   165 of needs; the producers ‘must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property’ (Capital, 178). This is the same structure Marx had already elaborated in the Excerpts and the Manuscripts. The fetish character of the commodity and commodity exchange respectively consist in the facts that people ascribe natural properties to things and factual circumstances, such as processes of commodity exchange, where these are social properties. This reification is aligned with the Feuerbachian projection model and based on the theory of objectification and estrangement, since it is interpreted as the self-loss of the human species being in capitalism. Hence it comes as no surprise that Marx by way of illustration points to the ‘misty realm of religion’ (Capital, 165) and thereby to the critique of religion. For money to become capital, wage labour must exist as the third precondition beyond the division of labour and private property. For whereas in the basic commodity exchange money functions only as a way station between commodities, this relationship is reversed with respect to capital: a capitalist possesses a certain amount of money and utilizes it by buying a commodity or having it produced for wages, in order to then sell the commodity at a profit. Schematically, this circulation is structured as follows: money–commodity–money, with the amount of money increasing through the circulation. Commodities are not produced for the sake of their use-values or the satisfaction of needs, but for the sole purpose of selling them for more money, which is then used for further capital gain in the next round. Here again we encounter the figure of thought according to which estrangement consists in a means-end-perversion, to repeat: exchange-value becomes the purpose, use-value the means. Marx depicts this process as a systematic nexus in which capital functions as an ‘automatic subject’ (Capital, 255): capitalism as a system is responsible for the continued existence of its own framework conditions and thus for its own perpetuation. The features of being autonomous and an end-in-itself that actually pertain to the human being—and this is the core of Marx’s evaluative philosophical anthropology—are estranged and relinquished to capital (as a system), which realizes these features in estranged-estranging and mechanical-automatic ways (Quante 2013). The social structures of private property in means of production and wage labour are thus solidified and the societal formation that is necessary for capitalism, once it gets under way, is cemented by the system itself. In Marx’s words: . . . the self-exploiting value (is) the subject of a process in which it changes its own magnitude amid the continuous change of the forms of money and commodity, repels itself as surplus-value from itself as the original value, exploits itself. (Capital, 255, translation altered)

Capital is the complete externalization of the human being as a social being that produces itself, freely determines itself, and has itself as an end. As an externalization of the actual species forces of the human being, capital has the quasi-subjective structures of an ‘autonomic subject’ and is characterized by the mean-end-inversion that is typical for estrangement. The capitalist does not produce for the sake of utility-values or needs; the wage labourer does not work for his own self-realization, the realization of the species, or satisfaction of others’ needs, but only to secure his own livelihood; the overall situation in society is not an expression of the free self-determination of the species being, but an

166   Michael Quante anonymous constellation of reification to which individual existence and liberty as well as the autonomy of the species are subordinated. At the same time, this synchronic state of the development of the species being as universal existence is a historically necessary step on the diachronic path to the self-realization of the species being through the historical process of estrangement. Marx’s analysis thus combines the systemic analysis of capitalism with a historico-philosophical construction, whereby the latter provides the central resource for his efforts to point to the necessary self-destabilization of capitalism; this is evident, for instance, in Marx’s theory of crisis and in his theorem concerning the tendency of the falling rate of profit. If the aim of capitalist circulation is to multiply money by means of the production and circulation of commodities and if money is nothing but value’s form of appearance, then this surplus-value must come from somewhere. Given Marx’s labour theory of value, surplus-value can only be created as an objectification of abstract labour. According to Marx, the capitalist must, in order to produce surplus-value, employ human working power. For this to accrue to the capitalist as surplus-value, it must take the form of buyable commodities and become part of the circulation process. So Marx’s model of capitalism is not possible without wage labour. Labour power creates value by objectifying itself in commodities. Under conditions of capitalism, it has value for the worker himself and for the capitalist who is dependent on the existence of wage labour; the magnitude of this value is defined as the working time necessary for the worker’s self-preservation (Capital, 185). Thus the surplus-value emerges in such a way that the capitalist exploits a difference: the worker receives a specific quantum of exchange-value (money) for his labour, which is enough for him to secure his survival and the preservation of his working power. In fact, however, the worker must work more for this wage than would be required for the preservation of his working power. Thus the capitalist exchanges a specific exchange-value for the working power, but lets the commodity that is the labour power be active longer so that the labour produces a larger quantum of value. This is the surplus-value that is reflected in the capitalist’s profit if he succeeds in selling the commodities produced in his name.

8.7  Conclusion: Critique of Political Economy as Theory of Justice? Whether or not Marx’s philosophy is to be understood as an evaluative-normative or as a purely descriptive theory also depends on whether one can understand his critique of political economy as a theory of justice. Such a theory might be a normative foundation of Marx’s theory that is not infected by the ambiguities concerning the metaphysics of species being that were delineated above. Let us start with the question of whether Marx defends an account of distributive justice in his labour theory of value. In his theory of value, Marx conceives the act of exchange as an exchange of equivalents. Since the capitalist system is designed for the creation of surplus-value, the question is where this surplus-value comes from. Under the Marxian premise that labour is the only factor that produces exchange-value, the rather obvious suspicion is that the capitalist’s profit materializes due

Marx (1818–1883)   167 to an infringement of the condition of liberty in the exchange of labour and wages. For this reason it has been seen as a central point of Marx’s critique of political economy that capitalism is held systematically to infringe the conditions of distributive justice, and of necessity to the workers’ disadvantage. It is undeniable that Marx sharply criticizes the injustice of the capitalist system, that he relentlessly bares the inhumanity of the living conditions of the proletariat and that he makes no secret of the fact that for the proletarians this societal formation means a maximal loss of opportunities to lead a good or successful life. They are reduced to merely animalistic functions and are defrauded of their humanity. But a closer look at Marx’s analysis of the circumstances of exchange reveals that within his theory he regards the capitalist’s profit in surplus-value as an exchange of equivalents and thus as just. The worker sells a specific amount of his labour power in the form of a quantitatively defined workday. The exchange-value of this externalized labour power consists in the worker’s ability to use his wages to regenerate himself and his labour power. If he earns enough to survive, he has received the exchange-value of his labour in the exchange of labour power for wages. Now the capitalist can legitimately make use of the labour power made available to him. As the externalized labour power is the only producer of exchange-value, the capitalist must see to it that within the working time available to him more exchange-value is produced than needs to be spent on wages. There is thus no reason to view the capitalist’s absorption of surplus-value as a violation of principle of equality that is effective in Marx’s analysis of the act of exchange. However, distributive justice does not exhaust the concept of justice; hence we have to see whether the Marxian analysis encompasses other aspects of justice. One possible objection to the reconstruction given here is that it is too closely oriented to the single act of exchange: the preconditions of a just exchange are not in place due to the systematically distorted position of capitalist and worker. Marx agreed with this assessment, but he did not infer from it that free exchange must be guaranteed as an entry condition. On the contrary, he calls for a change in the circumstances of production and not the set-up of distribution. Allen E. Buchanan (1982) has accused this discussion of assuming too narrow a concept of justice and looking merely at distribution. Instead, he presupposes that justified legal claims have lexical priority over mere aspects of welfare, no matter whether this concerns social welfare or the wellbeing of the right holder. Considering the fundamental criticism of a deontological account of morality which Marx pursues following Hegel, Buchanan’s analysis is not convincing as an interpretation of Marx’s theory, as can be demonstrated in light of Marx’s critique of the Gotha programme of social democracy. Marx’s normative counter-image does not take rights and equality as a starting point, but follows the maxim ‘everyone according to his abilities to everyone according to his needs!’, which would ‘completely exceed the narrow horizon of civil law’ (Kritik, 21). Buchanan is justified in his objection that Marx here simply segues from the statement that law is valuable and meaningful for individuals in capitalism to the statement that law is only valuable and meaningful in this social formation. We had to learn in the twentieth century that abandoning the rule of law amounts to an extreme loss of freedom. But Marx’s statement proves unequivocally that in his philosophical anthropology he was aiming at a standpoint beyond the law. The argumentative gap Buchanan diagnoses in Marx must therefore be closed in a different way from incorporating a deontological account of rights, as this could not be done without major revisions in Marx’s overall theory. The critique of

168   Michael Quante political economy does not rest on a deontological foundation. A more promising interpretative approach consists in explicating its ethical content in terms of a theory of recognition that is inscribed into the account of the objectual species being (Quante 2011 and 2013). (Translated by David P. Schweikard.)

Bibliography Karl Marx Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1843). In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1976, vol. 1, pp. 201–333. Zur Judenfrage. In Ruge, A. & Marx, K. (eds.):  Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1.  und 2. Lieferung. Paris 1844. Repr. in Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1976, vol. 1, pp. 347–77. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung. In Ruge, A. & Marx, K. (eds.): Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1. und 2. Lieferung. Paris 1844. Repr. in: Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1976, vol. 1, pp. 378–91. Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (1844). In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1968, Ergänzungsband:  Schriften bis 1844—Erster Teil, pp. 465–588. English edition: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975, vol. 3, pp. 229–346. Quoted as Manuscripts. Auszüge aus James Mills Buch ‘Élémens d’économie politique’. Trad. par J.T. Parisot, Paris 1823. In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1968, Ergänzungsband: Schriften bis 1844— Erster Teil, pp. 443–463. English edition: Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’économie politique. In Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975, vol. 3, pp. 211–28. Quoted as Excerpts. Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Frankfurt a.M.:  Literarische Anstalt (J. Rütten) 1845. Repr. in Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1980, vol. 2, pp. 5–223. Die deutsche Ideologie. In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1969, vol. 3, pp. 9–530. English edition: The German Ideology. In: Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers 1976, vol. 5, pp. 27–611. Quoted as Ideology. Das Kapital (erste Auflage). In Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1983):  Gesamtausgabe (= MEGA2), herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion u. v. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands; ab 1998 fortgeführt von der Internationalen Marx-Engels-Stiftung. Berlin: Dietz 1983, Zweite Abteilung, vol. 5. Quoted as Kapital. Das Kapital (vierte Auflage). In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1972, vol. 23. English Edition: Capital. Volume I. London: Penguin Books 1990. Quoted as Capital.

Marx (1818–1883)   169 Kritik des Gothaer Programms. In Marx, K. & Engels, F., Werke, herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Berlin: Dietz 1976, vol. 19, pp. 15–32. Quoted as Kritik.

Contemporary primary sources Bauer, B., Das entdeckte Christentum. Zürich/Wintherthur, 1843. Bauer, B., Die Judenfrage. Braunschweig: Verlag von Friedrich Otto, 1843. Cieszkowski, A. von, Prolegomena zur Historiosophie. Hamburg: Meiner, 1981. Feuerbach, L. (anonymus), Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit. Nürnberg: Verlag J.A. Stein 1830. Repr. in Feuerbach, L., Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 175–515. Feuerbach, L., Das Wesen des Christenthums. Leipzig:  Verlag Otto Wiegand, 1841. Repr. of the second edition in Feuerbach, L., Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie 1984, vol. 5. Feuerbach, L., ‘Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie’, in Ruge, A. (ed.): Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik. Zürich: Winterthur, 1843, vol. 2, pp. 62–86. Repr. in Feuerbach, L., Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie, 1982, vol. 9, pp. 243–63. Feuerbach, L., Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft. Zürich/Winterthur: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843. Repr. in Feuerbach, L., Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie, 1982, vol. 9, pp. 264–341. Hegel, G. W. F., Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bamberg und Würzburg: Verlag Joseph Anton Goebhardt, 1807. Repr. in Hegel, G. W. F., Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Bonsiepen and R. Heede. Hamburg: Meiner, 1980, vol. 9. Hess, M., Philosophische und sozialistische Schriften (1837–1850), ed. A. Cornu and W. Mönke. Berlin: Akademie, 1961. Stirner, M., Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Leipzig: Otto Wiegand, 1845. English edition: The Ego and Its Own, translated by David Leopold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Strauß, D. F., Das Leben Jesu. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1835.

Secondary sources Angehrn, E. & Lohmann, G. (eds.), Ethik und Marx. Moralkritik und normative Grundlagen der Marxschen Theorie. Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum/Hain, 1986. Archibald, W. P., Marx and the Missing Link: Human Nature. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989. Breckman, W., Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Brudney, D., Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Buchanan, A. E., Marx and Justice: The radical critique of liberalism. Totowa: Rowman & Allan Held, 1982. Cohen, G.  A., Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A  Defence. Expanded edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Cohen, M. et al. (eds.), Marx, Justice, and History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

170   Michael Quante Hartmann, K., Die Marxsche Theorie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970. Lange, E. M., Das Prinzip Arbeit. Drei metakritische Kapitel über Grundbegriffe, Struktur und Darstellung der ‚Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie’ von Karl Marx. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1980. Leopold, D., The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Magnis, F. von, Normative Voraussetzungen im Denken des jungen Marx (1843–1848). Freiburg: Alber, 1975. McLellan, D., The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. London: Macmillan, 1969. Meikle, S., Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx. London: Duckworth, 1985. Moggach, D., The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Moggach, D. (ed.), The New Hegelians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Moggach, D., ‘German Idealism and Marx’, in J. Walker (ed.), Historical, Social, and Political Theory (= Volume 2 of N. Boyle (ed.): The Impact of Idealism—the Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 189–242. Nielsen, K. & Patten, S. C. (eds.), Marx and Morality (= Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume VII). Edmonton, 1981. Peffer, R. G., Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Quante, M., Hegel’s Concept of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Quante, M., ‘Kommentar’, in Marx, K., Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009, pp. 209–411. Quante, M., ‘After Hegel. The Realisation of Philosophy through Action’, in Moyar, D. (ed.), Routledge Companion to 19th Century Philosophy. London, Routledge, 2010, pp. 197–237. Quante, M., ‘Recognition as the social grammar of species being in Marx’, in Ikäheimo, H. & Laitinen, A. (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology. Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 239–67. Quante, M., ‘Recognition in Capital’. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013), pp. 713–27. Rosen, Z., Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. Rosen, Z., Moses Hess und Karl Marx. Hamburg: Christians, 1983. Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. & Zurn, C. F. (eds.), The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. Thomson, E., The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Wood, A., Karl Marx. London: Routledge, 1981.

Chapter 9

Dilthey (1833–1911) Rudolf A. Makkreel 9.1 Introduction Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1833 and grew up with the expectation that he would follow his father as a chaplain to the House of Nassau. He started his university studies in religion and philosophy in Heidelberg, but when Kuno Fisher was fired for his liberal views, Dilthey transferred to Berlin to continue his studies. There Dilthey also attended the lectures of some of the great historians and students of culture of the nineteenth century:  Boeckh, Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Ritter and Ranke. He became less interested in religious issues per se but always remained interested in the effects of religions on history and human life. Dilthey wrote his dissertation on Schleiermacher’s ethics under the direction of the philosopher Friedrich Trendelenburg. In 1864, the same year that he completed the dissertation he also published his Habilitationsschrift on moral consciousness. His first teaching appointment away from Berlin was at Basel, where he was appointed as a professor of philosophy in 1867. He also taught in Kiel and Breslau. In 1882 he was able to return to the Berliner Universität and succeed Rudolf Hermann Lotze in the chair of philosophy that Hegel had once filled. Until his death in 1911, he would be one of the most inf luential intellectual figures there and at the Prussian Academy of the Sciences. Dilthey is often called a philosopher of life, but this does not mean that he is especially interested in the biological conditions of human existence. Life is conceived in historical terms and regarded as the context that frames the overall givenness of things. This contextual approach to life allows Dilthey to consider both the physiological conditions of human life as well as the reflective transcendental conditions for understanding what is given in historical experience. What Dilthey means by the given is not the sense-content of the positivists, but life as the unfathomable source and context of all experience. As he writes in his 1892 essay “Life and Cognition”: “no matter how hard I struggle to obtain the pure experience of the given, there is no such thing. The given lies beyond my direct experience. . . . Everything, absolutely everything that falls within my consciousness contains the given as ordered or distinguished or

172   Rudolf A. Makkreel combined or related, that is, as interpreted in intellectual processes.”1 The given is not an immediate present available to observation, but a mediated presence that needs to be placed in context. Life is that ultimate context which we cannot transcend or go behind. Every given of experience is already part of some larger whole called life.

9.2  The Human Sciences and the Reflexive Awareness of Lived Experience Dilthey’s most important contribution to philosophy was to rethink the nature of the human sciences. With the great strides made in historical awareness in the nineteenth century and the increasing tendency of psychological research to move away from philosophy and focus on experimentation, Dilthey considered it urgent to reflect on these newly developing disciplines to explore their scientific status. Could they be integrated into the system of the natural sciences? Positivists such as August Comte certainly thought so. According to Comte the task of the natural sciences is to gather facts and correlate them. Using that model, he argues that the facts gathered by historians should be correlated under the heading of a new science of sociology that completes the systems of the natural sciences. History is thereby reduced to the study of social interactions and institutional forces. The role that individuals play in history is minimized and this is reinforced by Comte’s dismissal of psychology. He discounts the reliability of introspection and claims that whatever we need to explain about individual human behavior can be done by means of biology and sociology alone. Dilthey by contrast aims to characterize historical life in ways that reflect some of the aspirations of German idealism while replacing its speculative approach with serious empirical research. The post-idealistic emphasis on gathering data and determining the facts was a tendency that Dilthey welcomed. However, he warns that positivism has a reductionist conception of facts. Facts of consciousness do not manifest the same atomistic features as facts of nature. If we think of inner experience in terms of an introspective turning our eyes inward, then psychology cannot advance very much. It would be a low level natural science. Therefore, Dilthey resists modeling inner experience on outer experience. Being truly empirical requires us to be aware of what distinguishes a subject matter. Here Dilthey takes his cue from his Aristotelian dissertation director, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. What distinguishes states of consciousness is that they form a continuum that allows us to describe them phenomenologically. We do not need to capture a state of mind in an introspective camera flash. Instead we can trace it as it develops. Consciousness is holistic and can be described accordingly. Dilthey offers an empirical approach (Empirie) that is not reducible to the empiricism (Empirismus) adopted by the natural sciences. He attempted to develop a new conception of the sciences that would reexamine Kant’s critical project of founding the natural sciences. This came to be his main project, namely to supplement Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with a “Critique of Historical Reason.” Kant’s foundation of the sciences was 1  See Wilhelm Dilthey, Understanding the Human World, Selected Works, vol. 2, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 60. Further references to essays in this volume will be abbreviated as SW 2, followed by the page number.

Dilthey (1833–1911)   173 focused on Newtonian physics and conceived explanation in mechanistic terms. Kant dismissed the speculations of rational psychology and had reservations about empirical psychology. Doubts about our ability to introspect led him to propose that we study mental life in relation to human behavior. He suggested we replace psychology with a pragmatic anthropology that would not attain the level of a universally valid (allgemeingültige) theoretical science, but would be generally useful (gemeinnützig). Dilthey’s response to this is to broaden the idea of the theoretical sciences to also include those disciplines that study history, society, and human life. These disciplines should not be relegated to being merely pragmatically useful supplements to the natural sciences. His first essay on this topic was called “On the Study of the History of the Sciences of Human Beings, Society and the State” and was published in 1875. Gradually he came to call these the Geisteswissenschaften. Literally this means the sciences of spirit, where spirit refers to the historical life of human beings. Dilthey makes it clear that spirit is not to be understood as existing independently from matter. All the sciences of the human spirit have a natural base. We will therefore simply call the Geisteswissenschaften the “human sciences.” They include not just the humanities, but also what are called the “social sciences.” In the early 1880s while still teaching in Breslau, Dilthey wrote an important programmatic draft for Book Four of his Introduction to the Human Sciences. In this so-called Breslau draft, he reconsiders the conditions of consciousness that make experience possible. Everything we experience “is a fact of consciousness and accordingly is subject to the conditions of consciousness”2 (SW1, 247). But these conditions are not rooted in the self of the cogito. For Dilthey, the ego is not a condition of consciousness, but its product. Before we can have a focused or reflective self-consciousness, there is a reflexive awareness (Innewerden) of how things are possessed in consciousness. Reflexive awareness involves a direct self-referential relation. This indexical condition accompanies the presence of any content of consciousness with the awareness that it is there in consciousness. Similarly, what is there can be located within the overall nexus of consciousness and related not only to what is thought, but also to what is felt and willed. What is given in reflexive awareness is experienced as being real and possesses the certainty (Gewissheit) of immediate knowledge (Wissen). However, certainty is subjective and is not to be confused with the reliability (Sicherheit) that constitutes the objective cognition (Erkenntnis) aimed at by epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie). Our immediate knowledge of facts of consciousness and the certainty of reflexive awareness do not come with any of the intellectual distinctions between inner and outer, form and content, subject and object that characterize the pure thought of Kant’s epistemic ego. If we are to arrive at the cognitive stage of an epistemology of the human sciences, the total content and nexus of the facts of consciousness must be subjected to self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). Self-reflection provides “the foundation for action as well as for thought. It seeks not only the conditions that give our statements about what is real their evident certainty, but also the conditions that guarantee the will and its rules their rightness or justness” (SW1, 268). Dilthey concludes that epistemology will remain overly tied to the

2 

Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, Selected Works, vol. 1. ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 247. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as SW1, followed by the page number.

174   Rudolf A. Makkreel natural sciences unless it is framed by a more encompassing self-reflection. Another way to put this is that the bare transcendental unity appealed to by Kant to ground the experience of objects of nature must be replaced with a holistic sense of selfsameness (Selbigkeit) that orients our lived experience of any aspect of the external world. It is within the nexus of total consciousness that self-reflection can begin to differentiate between facts of consciousness and facts of the world. Facts that are perceived as existing in my consciousness are grasped as part of inner perception and lead to a sense of self that can come to distinguish itself from a world. However, this distinction between self and world is not derivable from the intellect alone. Our belief in the reality of the external world is based primarily on felt resistance to practical impulses of the will rather than on inferences rooted in a causal theory. According to Dilthey the reflexive awareness accompanying acts of will provides a crucial step in the process of differentiating self and world. In the 1890 essay “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,” he indicates that our relation to the world is mediated through voluntary movements that run into resisting pressures. But the reflexive awareness of pressure sensations as resistance (Widerstand) does not disclose the reality of something independent until this resistance is reflectively acknowledged as a restraint (Hemmung) of the original intention. Thus it is from within ourselves and our lived bodies that we understand the real gap between an intention and its frustration. These two volitional states allow us to recognize not only objects that passively stand in our way, but also persons who can more actively constrain our intentions (see SW2, 16–23). Whereas representational consciousness projects the world as a theoretical horizon of natural science, reflexive awareness possesses the world as a temporal nexus in which one participates, but which is also full of things and persons that actively resist one’s will. The traditional epistemology of the natural sciences has made our practical relation to the world dependent on our theoretical relation, thereby ignoring our original access to it through reflexive awareness. Any new epistemology of the human sciences informed by self-reflection must reclaim this more basic access and thus cannot be merely an extension of the epistemology of the natural sciences. The human sciences have an advantage over the natural sciences in being closer to the full scope and richness of lived experience. Dilthey increasingly stresses that our access to the human world of history is much more direct than our access to nature. Although Dilthey is still willing to accept that objects of outer experience are phenomenal, he no longer accepts the Kantian thesis that the contents of inner experience are phenomenal as well. They are real and the time that relates us to history is not merely the ideal form that Kant had exposited. The contents of inner experience are not discrete like those of outer experience, but possess an interconnectedness that is lived. As soon as it is recognized that inner experience forms a nexus, it becomes clear that that inner and outer are not strict counterparts. Inner experience is not just the interior aspect of outer experience, but can be more comprehensive than any outer experience. Thus Dilthey speaks of perceiving the picture of Goethe in his study as an inner experience because as he is looking at it he remembers that it was a gift from his father. This example also shows how inner experience can already capture some aspects of our involvement in the historical world. Inner experience is really a lived experience whose connectedness can be sensed and whose nexus can be described.

Dilthey (1833–1911)   175 Dilthey sets out to show how these relations between the nexus of individual experience and the nexus of historical life are to be understood in his Introduction to the Human Sciences. But Books One and Two that were published together as volume 1 in 1883 do not fully broach the more encompassing issues of self-reflection that have been discussed already in relation to the Breslau Draft for Book Four. Instead they provide a preliminary historical account of the gradual development of the human sciences and how they can be delineated over against the better established natural sciences. Here Dilthey’s goal is much more modest than in the Breslau Draft, namely, to assert a relative independence of the human sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences. From the realm of nature, human beings distinguish “a realm of history, in which, amidst the objective necessity of nature, freedom is manifested at countless points” (SW1, 58). Our mental life is admittedly dependent on the physiology of our body, but this is not always reducible to causal relations. Certain correlations between the physical and the mental are merely functional and allow the will to exert itself. But even when we can be said to be free, we must take the laws of nature into account in devising the means to accomplish our goals. Dilthey asserts that his project of a “Critique of Historical Reason” is meant to delineate the human sciences “according to the reason of things that was active in their history” (SW1, 78). This approach is contrasted with that of Comte and John Stuart Mill who were attempting to construct the social and moral sciences as an extension of the natural sciences. The human sciences have to be understood in light of the historical practices that led to them and how they can continue to shape the future. This means that they do not merely observe what is and look for uniform patterns of human behavior, but also make evaluations and prescribe rules. It is the latter normative dimension that is lacking in Comte and Mill.

9.3  Delimiting Description and Analysis, Explanation and Understanding The human sciences differ from the natural sciences in being less reliant on hypothetical explanations. Since the givens of the external or material world are discrete and obtuse, our only way to relate these phenomena is through inference. The law-based causal connections that we use to explain natural changes have their origin in theory and must then be experimentally tested. This works quite well in the natural sciences because predictions about physical phenomena can be subjected to mathematical measurement. False hypotheses can be readily disconfirmed and replaced with more reliable hypotheses. Dilthey admits that the inner experiences to which the human sciences turn are less readily measurable and that hypotheses about them are difficult to test. But this is not an insuperable difficulty because hypotheses do not need to play as large a role in the human sciences as in the natural sciences. The lived connectedness that has been ascribed to inner experience does not need to be explained by hypotheses but can be described. Inner experience constitutes a continuum in which one mental act or state goes over into another. The processes of interaction are given as well as the way specific mental functions relate to the whole of our consciousness. These relations are to be sure somewhat indeterminate, and may need

176   Rudolf A. Makkreel to be refined with the help of hypotheses at some later point. But in its foundations psychology can dispense with hypotheses in a way that physics cannot. Since the constitution of matter is hypothetical, the natural sciences cannot readily appeal to elements that are in principle indivisible. But for the human sciences, the human being conceived as a psychophysical life-unit can be considered as the indexical “element from which society and history are formed” (SW1, 80). This psychophysical life-unit serves as the main element of the socio-historical world that the human sciences have as their subject matter. It provides a reality that is directly accessible to us and psychology is the first of the human sciences to describe its basic structures. However, the initial descriptions that psychology can offer of this basic life-unit are not truly foundational according to Dilthey, for “the subject matter of psychology is only a portion of that which takes place in each individual” (SW1, 81). The life-units that form the basic element of the human sciences are self-contained but not self-sufficient. They are inseparable from their historical and social context. Thus he writes: “Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction of genetic explanation; the human being which a sound analytic science takes as its object is the individual as a component of society” (SW1, 83). Psychology cannot be foundational in the traditional explanative sense. If it is foundational at all it is only to the extent that its descriptions are already oriented toward the larger context in which experience is situated. Particular states of mind must be described in relation to the overall structures of the human psychic nexus, and the latter must in turn be grasped as part of the larger socio-historical context. At the same time, Dilthey warns that individual human beings are not to be viewed as submerged in some larger organically conceived communal whole. The attempts by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal to develop a psychology of peoples (Völkerpsychologie) were rejected by Dilthey as positing transindividual subjects. The concept of the soul of a people is no more useful for history than is the concept of life-force for physiology. Both are mystical synthetic posits and do not contribute to the real task of the human sciences, which is to describe and analyze the psycho-socio-historical world. Individuals are to be regarded as distinct points of intersection of at least some of the various systems of interaction of society that the other human sciences can bring into focus. Some of these systems of interaction we are born into and others we may decide to join. The former are institutional in nature and “arise through power relations and external bonds of will” (SW1, 98); the latter are systems of interaction in which we can voluntarily participate and which are called “cultural systems.” Institutional systems constitute what Dilthey calls the “external organization of society” (SW1, 98). Institutions like family and state bind human beings to each other, and can supplement our grasp of human beings with what Dilthey calls second-order psychological concepts like loyalty and obedience. We can think of loyalty as a character trait, but psychology can only make sense of it with reference to the kinds of relations that are formed in institutions like the family. By contrast, the systems of interaction that we voluntarily participate in and that are called “cultural systems” include not only those more restricted associations that perform literary or artistic, academic or religious functions, but also economic and political associations that apply to the population in general. Whereas the external organizations of society foster hierarchical relations of dependence, cultural systems are viewed as involving cooperative relations among relative equals. Here too Dilthey points to second-order psychological concepts that will only arise in certain kinds of

Dilthey (1833–1911)   177 historical contexts. Thrift and the puritanical attitude would not have become prominent character traits without the rise of capitalism and Protestantism. No human science can account for the complexity of the historical world by itself. Attempts by Hegel to develop a comprehensive philosophy of history are rejected by Dilthey as dogmatic metaphysics. Similarly, he attacks the overarching science of sociology that Comte aimed to put in its place. The human sciences should describe and analyze the socio-historical world from a plurality of perspectives. These sciences can only do justice to the complexity of the historical world if they are conceived as being pluralistic. The importance of description and analysis as the basic methods of the human sciences is again confirmed by Dilthey’s next major work, the Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology of 1894. The roles of description and analysis are developed as the means of articulating the coherent structures of lived experience. The inherent connectedness of inner experience means that the synthetic and constructive methods of the natural sciences are not needed. Although the given connectedness found in lived experience is indeterminate, description and analysis can work together to explicate this connectedness without necessarily appealing to hypothetical explanations. But there are two further developments in the Ideas that are worth noting. As much as description and analysis remain the methods to be pursued, Dilthey begins to characterize their result as producing an understanding that establishes the meaning of experience. Thus instead of merely contrasting explanation and description, Dilthey works out his famous explanation-understanding distinction. Henceforth the human sciences will be conceived as primarily concerned with the understanding of the meaning of human action and interaction, and the natural sciences with explaining the causal succession of natural events. The term “understanding” here is a translation of the German Verstehen and is not to be confused with the faculty of understanding (Verstand) that is purely intellectual. Kant’s Verstand is the synthetic faculty of imposing explanative connections of thought on a manifold of outer sense. Dilthey’s Verstehen by contrast explicates an indeterminate sense of connectedness to give it a more articulate structure. The understanding of lived experience provides a reflective sense of the rich complexity of psychic life that accords with historical life and can never be attained through the abstract hypothetical methods of the natural sciences. Thus Dilthey writes what may be the best known lines he ever penned: We explain through purely intellectual processes, but we understand through the cooperation of all the powers of the mind activated by apprehension. In understanding we proceed from the context of the whole that is vividly given to us to then make the particular intelligible to ourselves (SW 2, 147).

Understanding is always contextual for Dilthey: it aims to make parts intelligible on the basis of the whole to which they belong. Explanations by contrast appeal to hypothetical generalizations that operate on the model of universal laws to which particulars can be subsumed. This then marks a tension between the part-whole approach of the human sciences and the particular-universal approach of the natural sciences. Although Dilthey does not rule out the possibility of finding some explanative laws in the human sciences, they will not have the global scope of the laws of the natural sciences. The reason that the natural sciences can develop many laws of universal scope is that they abstract from concrete reality and isolate a limited number of variables. This is less feasible when it comes

178   Rudolf A. Makkreel to understanding the complexity of historical development. The reflective understanding of history makes it possible to discern structural patterns and regularities that define the more specific systematic organizations that the different human sciences make possible. It is therefore unlikely that we will discover grand historical laws of progress as Hegel and Comte hoped, but we may be able to establish lawful patterns of development within the more specific socio-economic and cultural systems that the human sciences can establish through analysis. What the descriptive and analytic methods of psychology and other human sciences mainly aim at is an understanding of history as a process of the structural articulation of life. In some instances it may be possible to interpolate lawful explanations whose universality is limited to specific cultural systems or institutional contexts. Thus the explanation-understanding distinction of the Ideas is not an absolute one. Another important advance of the Ideas concerns the analysis of the different kinds of structures that can be found in lived experience. According to Dilthey our lived experience of the world does not merely cognitively represent it. What is attended to in perception is already influenced by the interests of our feelings. Nor can we adequately know something without carefully focusing on it, which is a function of our will. Thus at any moment our lived experience is a nexus of representational, evaluative, and volitional responses to the world. The basic descriptive structure of psychic life is this nexus of lived experiences. Analysis can, however, distinguish states of mind that are primarily directed by a representational attitude from other states that are principally guided by an evaluative or volitional attitude. Dilthey writes: “The inner relation among these various aspects of my attitude or the structure that connects these threads is not the same in the affective state as in the volitional, which again is not the same as in the representational attitude” (SW 2, 175). These three aspects of our experience do not come separately, but on the basis of a functional analysis it is possible to relate representational states of mind into a structural cognitive system. Within this representational system we relate perceptual and conceptual aspects of experience and examine how memory and imagination contribute to cognition. The felt and evaluative aspects of experience can similarly be related functionally to form a second structural system that allows us to coordinate the value of things aesthetically and morally. Finally, Dilthey analyzes a volitional system that generates the overriding purposes of life and considers the means to attain them. These three general structural systems of human experience are a product of a functional analysis and are thus somewhat abstract. However, each individual gradually develops what Dilthey calls an “acquired psychic nexus” that structurally recapitulates the results of past experiences. This acquired nexus is a concrete structure that sums up not only the overall cognitive sense of reality but also the composite of values and goals of an individual. At times Dilthey compares the acquired psychic nexus to an apperceptive fund that influences subsequent perceptions by selecting from what is given to sense those aspects that reinforce our expectations about reality, accord with our values, and favor our purposes. But the acquired psychic nexus is a dynamic structural system and adapts over time to also take into account experiences that do not conform to our expectations. Its apperceptive function is to orient us to the world so that we can respond to the world in light of what we have learned from the past and what we aim at for the future. The acquired psychic nexus gives a historical dimension to Dilthey’s descriptive psychology and provides the basic context for understanding the meaning of an individual’s experience. What we call “memory” is not to be regarded as a special storehouse of separate data, but is to be

Dilthey (1833–1911)   179 reconceived as a function of the overall acquired psychic nexus, namely, a growing organizational framework that constantly re-integrates the meaning of an individual’s life. It also entails that no experience can recur in exactly the same way. Each time we look at a painting by Dürer we see it in a more enriched way informed by past viewings. When speaking of the imagination of great writers in his 1887 essay “The Imagination of the Poet,” Dilthey points to their power to complete their core imagery by evoking the rich scope of their acquired psychic nexus. “Only when the whole acquired psychic nexus becomes active can images be transformed on the basis of it: innumerable, immeasurable, almost imperceptible changes occur in their nucleus. And in this way, the completion of the particular originates from the fullness of psychic life” (SW 5, 104). Particular imagery can become typical of a poet’s worldview and can mark a work’s historical style. From this holistic perspective, the poetic imagination serves not to synthetically connect imagery in the traditional Kantian manner but to structurally articulate the indeterminate sense of connectedness that already comes with ordinary lived experience. The overall context of lived experience is given a focal point that concentrates our attention.

9.4  Reflective Experience and the Apperception of Cultural Meaning Dilthey planned to supplement his descriptive psychology with a comparative psychology. But because his Ideas were not received favorably at first (they would later be embraced by Husserl as a “genial” anticipation of phenomenology), he decided to publish a more broadly conceived work called Contributions to the Study of Individuality (1895–6). There he answers both those who attacked him from the standpoint of explanative psychology, which continued to model psychology on the natural sciences, as well as those who challenged his approach to the human sciences from the Neo-Kantian perspective. Neither the explanative psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus nor the Neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband could do justice to the richness of inner experience. That was because they did not recognize the importance of the acquired psychic nexus that continues to articulate our inner experience. We spoke of this nexus as an apperceptive fund that regulates future experiences. It also provides the basis for what Dilthey calls “transcendental reflection” (SW2, 216), which leads to the recognition that not all experiences that have an inner resonance derive from within. The acquired psychic nexus allows us to make a reflective distinction that delineates a third class of experiences. Such experiences have an external reference, but “provide an analogue of inner experience and serve to expand our knowledge of the nexus of psychic life beyond the horizon of inner experience” (SW2, 216). This third kind of experience in effect apperceives a perceived outer object as possessing a value or meaning not derived from my own life, but from a pre-given cultural context with which one identifies. Thus an individual may recognize that a statue in a park is of a leader from that person’s nation’s past as well as a creation of a well-known sculptor. This third kind of experience involves an understanding that locates something “inner” in what is outer. One finds a shared or public meaning in this statue from one’s cultural heritage.

180   Rudolf A. Makkreel The fact that Dilthey spoke of this kind of experience in the context of a discussion of transcendental reflection allows us to think of it as a reflective experience. It appeals to transcendental conditions, not as Kant did to gain access to the natural world of outer experience, but to reflect on our place in the spiritual-cultural world. This is not a world that stands apart from us or even in opposition to our will; it is a social world that can be said to be co-constituted by us. In doing so, we apperceive certain objects as more than external givens, namely, as objectifications of human activity and productivity. What outer experience perceives as a natural object can, under certain conditions, be apperceived by reflective experience as expressing something about human life in general. Reflective experience is “transcendental” in giving our life-context a spiritual significance. Whereas Windelband proposed that the historical and cultural sciences can be delineated from the natural sciences by focusing on idiographic detail and dispensing with nomothetic or lawful generalizations, Dilthey discerns generalizations on both sides. But generalizations about nature are based merely on external correlations while those about historical and cultural life involve a reflective understanding of an inherent connectedness. In 1900 Dilthey published his famous essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” There he shows how the art of interpretation “originated in the personal and inspired virtuosity of the philologist”3 from which rules of overcoming exegetical challenges were handed down. The subsequent need to find a basis for such rules leads to the science of hermeneutics, which he defines as the theory of the rules of interpreting written texts and documents. In conclusion Dilthey writes: “in relation to epistemology, logic and the methodology of the human sciences, the theory of interpretation becomes an important link between philosophy and the historical sciences, an essential component in the foundation of the human sciences” (SW4, 250). If hermeneutics is to claim an essential role for all the human sciences, how are we to conceive its relation to Dilthey’s earlier reliance on psychological description and analysis? Dilthey still maintains that the human sciences have an advantage over the natural sciences in that each of us has access to an inner reality that constitutes a psychic nexus experienced from within. Yet the reflexive awareness of one’s own condition cannot by itself bring one an understanding of one’s individuality. That requires a comparison of oneself with others. Just as one comes to understand others from the outside, one too can only adequately understand oneself from the outside. In the Ideas it was assumed that what is grasped in lived experience provided self-understanding. But now Dilthey writes that “the apprehension of our own states can only be called understanding in a figurative sense” (SW4, 236). True self-understanding also requires one to come to terms with the way one expresses oneself. Understanding is redefined as “the process by which we recognize, behind signs given to our senses, that psychic reality of which they are the expression” (SW4, 236). What we learn about ourselves from the inside must be tested and even corrected by observation of how we express what we feel and think. A further refinement about the reflective understanding (Verstehen) needed for the human sciences as distinct from the cognitive understanding (Verstand) that suffices for the natural sciences can be found in Dilthey’s last major work, The Formation of the

3 Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, Selected Works, vol. 4, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 238. Further references to this volume will be abbreviated as SW4.

Dilthey (1833–1911)   181 Historical World in the Human Sciences of 1910. The human sciences study human beings both by how they are formed by historical events, state institutions, social customs, and how they give objective form to the world through their productive activities. Such objective achievements, Dilthey writes, “always contain, like man himself, a reference back from an outer sensory aspect to one that is withdrawn from the senses and therefore inner”4 (SW 3,106). He then goes on to warn that it is a common error to resort to psychic life to account for what this inner aspect is (an error that still lingers in “The Rise of Hermeneutics” as reflected near the end of the previous paragraph). Thus to understand the inner meaning of the laws of a state at a particular time one need not go back to the mental states of the legislators who voted for them. Historians must study the relevant legal documents of an age, the available records of court procedures, the behavior of judges, plaintiffs, and defendants as the expressions of the rules and norms that govern a system of jurisprudence. Understanding the inner core of Roman law requires, not a reliving of the intentions of individual legislators or judges, but “a regress to a spiritual formation that has its own structure and lawfulness” (SW3, 107) and represents a common will. This also applies to the understanding of individual human creations such as the work of a dramatic poet. What is expressed in such a work “is not the inner processes in the poet; it is rather a nexus created in them but separable from them. The nexus of a drama consists in a distinctive relation of material, poetic mood, motif, plot, and means of representation” (SW 3, 107). What is to be understood “at first” (SW3, 107) is the inner structural meaning of these moments that constitute the work. The qualification “at first” added here about an individual work indicates that in some cases the psychic processes of the author may become relevant if there is something about the structural nexus of the work that seems unusual or even incoherent. But for most historical objectifications the hermeneutic regress locates a meaning nexus that is publically accessible because what we experience is infused with local commonalities.

9.5  Common Objective Contexts and Productive Systems From infancy our consciousness is nurtured by the local social and cultural context in which we find ourselves. Dilthey thinks of this context as the medium of objective spirit. He borrows the term “objective spirit” from Hegel, but makes it clear that he can no longer accept the rational presuppositions of Hegel. Instead of deriving objective spirit from reason, Dilthey goes back to the structural nexus that places human beings in historical communities. Once objective spirit is extricated from its one-sided foundation in a universal reason . . . a new conception of it becomes possible that encompasses language, custom, every form and

4 Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works, vol. 3.,

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 238. Further references to this volume will be abbreviated as SW3.

182   Rudolf A. Makkreel style of life, as well as family, civil society, state, and law. And what Hegel distinguished from objective spirit as absolute spirit, namely, art, religion, and philosophy, also falls under this same concept (SW3, 173).

We are always already immersed in objective spirit as a medium of commonalities that allows us to understand each other at least locally. It is the task of the human sciences to move from this elementary understanding of our familiar surroundings to the level of higher understanding that considers to what extent the commonalities that are locally shared can be universalized. The greater the distance between a given objectification of life and the interpreter, the more uncertainty tends to arise. But even expressions that are familiar to us may disclose inconsistencies that need further analysis that can be facilitated by the disciplinary methods of the human sciences. Each of the human sciences considers what is expressed and objectified in terms of its special systematic context. If what is objectified concerns human interaction, then social, political, and cultural considerations will become relevant. Sociology for instance could be used to bring generalizations about group behavior to bear. Certain behavioral anomalies might even need to be explained causally. However, if what is expressed is more personal in nature, the generalizations of psychology could still be useful. The hermeneutical approach to the human sciences that Dilthey developed at the end of his life no longer allows psychology (or any other discipline) to claim a relative priority, but it does not reject psychology either. In fact, he welcomed Husserl’s early phenomenological works as a confirmation of the validity of his own earlier efforts to develop a descriptive psychology. In three preliminary studies for the Formation of the Historical World, Dilthey sketched some of the ways Husserl’s theory of the intentionality of consciousness could be adapted to account not only for the way cognitive perception is of things, but also for the way feelings about them are referred back to our own state of mind and can lead us to reflect on structurally related past experiences. Here the direction of consciousness is not projective but involves a “being-pulled-along by the state of affairs itself” (SW3, 51). In the Formation of the Historical World, Dilthey still considers individual human beings to be the main carriers of historical life and the crossing points of social and cultural systems. However, he is now willing to speak of the spirit of people (Volksgeist) as a logical subject of historical discourse as long as it is not reified into a real subject or soul of the people (Volksseele). In the Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey had rejected both concepts as mystical. Another change that occurs in the later work is that social and cultural systems are not all called purposive systems with an intentional direction. Instead he introduced a more neutral concept of a productive nexus or system (Wirkungszusammenhang). The efficacy of life in the historical world is to be understood in terms of productivity before any causal or teleological explanations can be attempted. The carriers of history, whether they are individuals or communities, cultures or institutions, can all be conceived as productive systems capable of producing value and meaning. Each productive system can be thought of as centered in itself and as possessing what Kant had called “immanent purposiveness,” but it may not have one defining purpose. The agency of human individuals too can be considered in terms of a productive nexus in so far as they select what is of interest in their present experience on the basis of past evaluations and can set themselves purposes in light of both. The productivity of a person’s acquired psychic nexus lies in its regulative role in responding to its surroundings.

Dilthey (1833–1911)   183 Individuals as productive systems are centered in themselves, but they are never fully self-sufficient and must be related to other more inclusive productive systems. Once these larger cooperative systems are created, they can assume a life of their own and outlive the individuals that formed them. But they cannot perpetuate themselves without the participation of other human beings. Although individuals must rely on cultural and socio-economic systems, they need not be subordinated to them. Dilthey upholds this claim by arguing that each productive system only engages partial aspects of individuals. It is also the case that some individuals are capable of putting their stamp on the way such systems function so that more than the rationally agreed upon goals of the system may be achieved. Individuals need only give part of themselves to these more inclusive systems, yet they can express something of their whole being through this part. This is why no productive system can be adequately understood through a rational reconstruction of the purposes it was designed to fulfill. Productive systems articulate the intermediary structures of the development of historical life. A further complication arises from Dilthey’s pluralistic approach whereby many such systems are allowed to intersect and interact. It is the task of the human sciences to develop disciplinary and methodological tools to analyze these productive systems and how they can influence each other. However, their scientific contributions arise at the level of higher understanding and aim to refine what was assimilated at the level of elementary understanding. Here we come back to the distinction we saw Dilthey make between knowledge (Wissen) and cognition (Erkenntnis). What individuals make sense of on the basis of the commonalities of everyday experience counts as the knowledge of elementary understanding. The human sciences make an additional cognitive contribution by bringing the universal perspective of epistemic and logical thought to bear. But unlike the natural sciences, the human sciences cannot dismiss what was already grasped at the level of lived experience as irrelevant. The hermeneutical task of the human sciences requires them to use the results of their methodological inquiries to return to the concerns and questions that already arose at the level of elementary understanding. But it also requires a further consideration of what knowledge is. In the Breslau draft of the Introduction of the Human Sciences, Dilthey referred to the immediate knowledge (Wissen) of reflexive awareness that precedes the conceptually mediated cognition (Erkenntnis) of the natural sciences. In The Formation of the Historical World Dilthey proposes a more comprehensive theory of knowledge for the human sciences that “must refer to all classes of knowledge” which now extends “to the conceptual cognition of reality, to the positing of values, and to the determination of purposes and the establishment of rules” (SW3, 25). This more encompassing knowledge that the human sciences are expected to produce must include not only the immediate knowledge that comes with the reflexive awareness of ordinary experience, but also the cognitive clarification that derives from descriptive analysis and conceptual explication. The disciplinary approach of the distinct human sciences can reorganize our understanding of historical life in terms of structural systems. But what ultimately differentiates the theory of knowledge (Theorie des Wissens) of the human sciences from the epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) of the natural sciences is the reflective inclusion of value considerations and the normative prescription of rules. The knowledge of the human sciences aims at what Dilthey had earlier called the self-reflection that comes to terms with both action and thought. Therefore, we can say that the overall goal of Dilthey’s project of a Critique of Historical Reason is to move from (1) the immediate knowledge of life to (2) its

184   Rudolf A. Makkreel conceptual cognition to (3) a more comprehensive reflective knowledge that is normative. The higher understanding of the human sciences must go over into what could be called a reflective understanding. Here the human sciences begin to overlap with the normative aspects of philosophy dealing with ethical and legal issues.

9.6 World-Views It is this reflective knowledge or third kind of understanding that Dilthey also attempts to come to terms with in his theory of world-views. The sciences are by their nature partial and cannot provide an overarching world-view. A world-view (Weltanschauung) literally means an intuition of the world, but it really aims to provide a fundamental insight into its nature. It constitutes an attempt to provide not only a cognitive picture of the world, but also an estimation of what is valuable in life and a determination of what is worth striving for. World-views seek to address all aspects of our relation to the world. They are not products of mere thought, but arise from life-concerns and attitudes toward life that express the overall structure of our psychic life. At their root, world-views are mood-like ways of being attuned to the world. Dilthey calls them “life-moods (Lebensstimmungen)” (GS VIII, 81) in a way that expands a psychological state of mind into a worldly orientation. World-views aim to develop a total picture of reality and guidance about how we should respond to it. They have received their most prominent realizations in literary, religious, and philosophical works. But because they attempt to provide an overall understanding of reality, no account has been provided that is fully coherent and has received universal acceptance. Dilthey’s admission of this shortcoming has led many to charge him with relativism. To avoid this consequence we must stay within the limits of what we can cognize about reality on the basis of the natural and human sciences, each of which brings a universally valid but a distinctive perspective on things. Through their attempts to give conceptual determinacy to world-views and spell them out in terms of metaphysical systems, philosophers have underscored the problem of relativism by producing conflicting formulations. Dilthey analyzes three recurrent types of such metaphysical formulations: naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and objective idealism. They often challenge each other and this leads each type to return in a revised form. The naturalism of Democritus, Hobbes, Hume, and Nietzsche attempts to account for as much as possible in life from what can be cognized. Its epistemology is sense-based and its metaphysics tends to be deterministic. Yet its reliance on the senses also leads to an acceptance of the passions. This produces tensions that make room for skepticism. Naturalism can therefore be characterized as being ultimately pluralistic. Idealism of freedom as found in Plato, Cicero, Kant, and Fichte insists on the sovereignty of the will and is dualistic in that it places a limit on the deterministic powers of nature. Objective idealism as found in Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and Hegel affirms the overall unity of reality and sees all dissonances of life dissolve in a universal harmony. The three types of metaphysical world-views are incommensurable in that each sets its priorities differently. Naturalism prioritizes the cognitive aspect of experience, the idealism of freedom the volitional aspects, and objective idealism the intermediary feelings that hold things together. Dilthey finds naturalism too reductive; his ethical views lead

Dilthey (1833–1911)   185 him towards the idealism of freedom; his own life-perspective makes objective idealism the most attractive. No metaphysical formulation can have more than relative validity because it attempts to arrive at a determinate totalization where only an overall coherence can be expected. Artistic and literary expressions of world-views remain important because they do not claim to be as totalizing and preserve more of the intuitive aspects of human experience that get lost in the abstractions of metaphysics. They provide a significant supplement to the human sciences as they attempt to fulfill their mission of producing reflective knowledge about historical life.

Bibliography Works by Dilthey Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi. 26 vols. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914–2006. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Works. Edited by Rudolf A.  Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Vol. 1, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1989); Vol. 2, Understanding the Human World (2010); Vol. 3, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (2002). Vol. 4, Hermeneutics and the Study of History (1996). Vol. 5, Poetry and Experience (1985). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Works on Dilthey Ermarth, Michael. Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. A comprehensive account of Dilthey’s thought with a good historical background. Lessing, Hans-Ulrich, Makkreel, Rudolf A., and Pozzo, Riccardo, eds. Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2011. Nine essays on the continuing relevance of Dilthey’s thought. Makkreel, Rudolf A. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, 1992. A developmental examination of Dilthey’s philosophy that focuses on its relation to Kant’s first and third Critiques and highlights the role of reflection and judgment in historical understanding. Makkreel, Rudolf A. and Scanlon, John D. eds. Dilthey and Phenomenology. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1987. Exploration of Dilthey’s relation to phenomenology by ten international scholars. Mul, Jos de. The Tragedy of Finitude:  Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life. Translated by Tony Burrett. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. A reconstruction of Dilthey’s ontology of life, highlighting the interpretive character of human existence, contingency, and narrativity. Owensby, Jacob. Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. A topical study focusing on Books 4–6 of the Introduction to the Human Sciences. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 57 (4) (2003). Issue featuring a collection of essays edited by Rudolf Makkreel, including essays by Jean Grondin, Hans Ineichen, Matthias Jung, Makkreel, Sylvie Mesure, Jos de Mul, Tom Rockmore, and Frithjof Rodi.

186   Rudolf A. Makkreel Rodi, Frithjof, ed. Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983–2000. Each of the 12 volumes has a special theme such as the relation between Dilthey and the early Heidegger. Rodi, Frithjof and Lessing, Hans-Ulrich, eds. Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. A collection of classical essays on Dilthey by such thinkers as Scheler, Landgrebe, Bollnow, Plessner, Marcuse, Misch, Habermas, and Gadamer. Rodi, Frithjof. Das strukturierte Ganze:  Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003. A series of essays stressing the structured nature of life and experience, and the importance of articulation and expression for Dilthey.

Chapter 10

N ietz sche (184 4–1900) Brian Leiter 10.1  Introduction: Nietzsche’s Life and Intellectual Formation Born in 1844 in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony, Friedrich Nietzsche was the son and grandson (on both sides of his family) of Lutheran pastors. After his father’s death in 1849, Nietzsche was raised primarily by the women in his family, his mother and older sister Elisabeth, as well as various aunts. He entered Pforta, Germany’s preeminent school for classical studies, in 1858, then enrolled in 1864 at the University of Bonn to study theology. A year later, he decided to change fields and followed the eminent classicist Friedrich Ritschl to the University of Leipzig, where Nietzsche distinguished himself as a brilliant student of classical philology. He earned appointment to the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1869, without a doctorate but on the strength of Ritschl’s recommendation alone. (He subsequently completed a thesis on Diogenes Laertius, a third-century commentator on early Greek philosophy.) Nietzsche served briefly, in 1870, as a medical orderly in the Franco–Prussian war, but ill health forced him out after only two months. His health problems grew progressively worse—‘uninterrupted three-day migraine[s]‌, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm’ (EH I: 1) is one description Nietzsche offers—until he was forced to retire from his teaching position in 1879. Nietzsche spent the remainder of his sane life as a pensioned invalid travelling between inns in Southern Europe both seeking respite from his physical ailments and composing his most celebrated works. In January 1889, after weeks of worsening symptoms, he suffered a mental collapse in Turin, and spent the rest of his life under the care of institutions, his mother, and, finally, his proto-Nazi sister Elisabeth. (Untreated syphilis from some 20 years earlier appears to be the most likely cause of his health problems.) Elisabeth did her best to exploit his growing fame, and even issued heavily edited editions of his work that omitted Nietzsche’s hostility towards both Germany and anti-semitism. By his death in 1900, Nietzsche was one of the most celebrated philosophers in Europe; by the start of World War I, the Kaiser issued German troops copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and over the next generation, every political party and every intellectual fashion fought to claim his legacy.

188   Brian Leiter No less important than the basic biographical facts of his life are the crucial intellectual influences: first, his deep scholarly engagement with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, and culture; and second, the two crucial books he discovered in the mid-1860s, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Friedrich A. Lange’s The History of Materialism. Let us consider these in turn. Nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of the modern discipline of classics (or classical philology, as it was then known), as it was of so many other modern academic fields. As a Wissenschaft, training in classical philology emphasized the development of rigorous scholarly methods that would guarantee the reliability of its results, from a thorough command of languages and primary source materials, to various tools and techniques for determining the provenance of source materials, evaluating their reliability, and fixing their meaning. Although Nietzsche—then under the influence of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner—made clear with his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, his impatience with the narrow cultural horizons of his professional colleagues, he never abandoned his high regard for their intellectual discipline, writing in one of his very last works of his admiration for ‘scholarly culture’, characterized by ‘scientific methods’ including ‘the great, the incomparable art of reading well’ (A: 59). Philology, for Nietzsche, represented that ‘art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation’ (A: 52). Even more important for understanding Nietzsche, however, is what he learned from his study of the ancients. Nietzsche’s philosophical loyalty was to the Presocratic philosophers (cf. WP 437, EH III: BT-3), including the ‘Sophists’ of the fifth century bc, an intellectual movement he interpreted broadly to include the great Greek historian Thucydides. Nietzsche admired Thucydides for his ‘courage in the face of reality’ (TI X:  2), that is, the courage to recognize the ‘immorality’ of the Greeks, their lust for power and glory, which he portrayed so unflinchingly in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Nietzsche viewed this kind of realistic appraisal of human motives as a hallmark of ‘the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists’ (TI X: 2), and he emulates their realism in his own commentary on human motives and affairs. But Nietzsche also admired other aspects of philosophy before Socrates, aspects that he finds especially well-represented by the Presocratic philosopher Thales. First, Thales, according to Nietzsche, tries to explain the observable world naturalistically, that is, ‘in language devoid of image or fable’, thus ‘show[ing] him[self] as a natural scientist’ (PTAG: 3). Yet at the same time—and this is the second important point about the Presocratics for Nietzsche—in Thales, ‘the man of wisdom [Weisheit] triumphs in turn over the man of science [Wissenschaft]’ (PT: 145), in the sense that, ‘Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost’ (PTAG: 3), whereas the genuine philosopher (in possession of Weisheit) pursues knowledge not ‘at any cost’, but only in the service of what the philosopher deems valuable: ‘Genuine philosophers’, as Nietzsche says, ‘are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!”’ (BGE 211). Nietzsche claims to find this insight in Thales, and it is one Nietzsche himself prizes throughout his work. As he puts it in the 1886 Preface to The Gay Science: [T]‌his will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us. . . . Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything. . . .

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   189 Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. (GS Pref: 4)

The Greeks understood that the ‘truth’ about the human situation is terrible, and that sometimes not knowing the truth is to be preferred. This amounts to scepticism not about truth, but about the value of always knowing the truth. That lesson from the Presocratics was only reinforced for Nietzsche by his reading of Schopenhauer, the second great intellectual influence on his philosophy. In 1865, he discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1818, but which only came to great prominence some 20 years later, as a reaction against Hegel’s idealism took hold of German culture (Hegel himself had died in 1831, and it is unclear if Nietzsche ever read him). Nietzsche took from Schopenhauer a number of ideas, but the most important was the question how life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, could possibly be justified. Schopenhauer offered a ‘nihilistic’ verdict: that we would be better off dead.1 Nietzsche, throughout his philosophical career, wanted to resist that conclusion, all the time acknowledging the terrible truth about the inescapability of suffering. In addition, however, Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer’s idea of the unalterability of character, the idea that there is a certain psychic core of the person that remains largely unchanged throughout one’s life, even if it admits of some pruning—much as the seed of a tomato plant will necessarily give rise to nothing other than a tomato plant, though the quality of gardening will surely affect its final character. Schopenhauer’s naturalistic and fatalistic view of personality was reinforced for Nietzsche by another major intellectual discovery he made a year later in his reading of Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism. Lange was both a Neo-Kantian—part of the ‘back to Kant’ revival in German philosophy after the eclipse of Hegel—and a friend of the ‘materialist’ turn in German intellectual life, which comprised the other major part of the reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s (and which are associated today with Hermann von Helmholtz’s work in the 1840s and after). Materialism exploded on the intellectual scene in Germany in the 1850s in such volumes as Jacob Moleschott’s The Physiology of Food, Karl Vogt’s Blind Faith and Science, and Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter. Force and Matter was a particular sensation, which went through multiple editions and became a best-seller with its message, as Büchner put it, that ‘the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings.’ Nietzsche first learned of these German Materialists from Lange (though he subsequently began reading the main journal of the movement, Suggestions for Art, Life and Science), though Lange took the view (following Helmholtz) that the Materialist picture of man as determined by his physiological and biological 1  Schopenhauer did not, however, recommend suicide for the living, since that would still involve acting on individual desire, namely, the desire for a cessation of suffering.

190   Brian Leiter nature actually vindicated Kant’s transcendental idealism by proving the dependence of our knowledge on the physiological peculiarities of the human sensory apparatus. We know from Nietzsche’s letters that he viewed Lange’s book as ‘undoubtedly the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades’ (Janz 1978 I: 198) and that in 1866, he declared, ‘Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange—I don’t need anything else’ (Janz 1978 I: 198). These myriad intellectual influences—the Sophists and Presocratics, Schopenhauer, German Materialism, Neo-Kantianism, among others—come together in Nietzsche’s work in sometimes surprising and not always wholly consistent ways. They seem to have wreaked particular mischief with his views about truth and knowledge, where his views may be more notable for their apparent incoherence than their philosophical interest; but they are essential for understanding his central contributions in ethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of mind and action.

10.2  Nietzsche’s Style and His Philosophy Before we turn to Nietzsche’s substantive philosophical contributions and claims, it is useful to say a word about the ‘style’ in which Nietzsche writes, a style that no doubt accounts for his immense popularity beyond the realms of academic philosophy. Nietzsche can be funny, sarcastic, rude, wicked, scholarly, offensive, clever, and scathing. He writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically, and always very personally. He eschews almost entirely the typical discursive form of philosophical writing:  he almost never tries to persuade through the power of rational argumentation. Reading Spinoza or Kant, and then reading Nietzsche, one might be surprised to discover they are part of a single genre called ‘philosophy’, although there is considerable overlap in subject-matter. Yet in the course of examining philosophical subjects, Nietzsche will invoke historical, physiological, psychological, philological, and anthropological claims, and almost never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone set out a syllogism. Nietzsche’s philosophical style is no accident; it is precisely the approach one would expect him to adopt given his philosophical views about the nature of persons and reason. For Nietzsche, influenced as he was by Schopenhauer and the German Materialists, thinks the conscious and rational faculties of human beings play a relatively minor role in what they do, believe, and value; that far more important are their unconscious and subconscious affective and instinctive lives, as well as the physiological facts that explain the former. (We will return to this topic in the following paragraphs.) As Nietzsche puts the point early in Beyond Good and Evil, what inspires ‘mistrust and mockery’ of the great philosophers is that: They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic . . . while what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an ‘inspiration’ or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract—and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such. (BGE 5)

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   191 Philosophical systems, then, are not the upshot of rational inquiry; the dialectical justifications for them are supplied after-the-fact. Instead, Nietzsche explains, ‘the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [e.g. the metaphysical system] has always grown’ and thus ‘there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher’, for his moral (and immoral) intentions ‘bear decided and decisive witness to who he is—which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other’ (BGE 6). Nietzsche, crucially, will not partake of this charade of offering post-hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses that simply reflect his evaluative judgments which, in turn, reflect the psychological facts about who he really is. To simplify a bit: since psychology determines values, and values determine philosophy, then to change people’s evaluative and philosophical views, one must affect their psychology, more precisely, their drives (drives being dispositions to have certain kinds of affective or emotional responses2). But non-rational drives can only be influenced through non-rational devices, including all the stylistic devices noted already: if you provoke, amuse, and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his or her affects, and thus can change the reader’s evaluative attitudes. The discursive mode of most philosophy, by contrast, is inert when it comes to reorienting the non-rational psyche—but reorienting the affects and values of at least some of his readers is a paramount concern for Nietzsche, as we will see.

10.3  Philosophical Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind and Action ‘Naturalism’ as a tradition in philosophy views human beings as not really different from the rest of the natural world, and thus one understands and explains human behaviour just as one understands and explains other natural phenomena. Nietzsche found variations of that vision in a variety of philosophers he studied and admired, including Thales, Spinoza, Herder, Schopenhauer, and the German Materialists; indeed, his own philosophical perspective on most topics bears the most striking resemblance to that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (whom Nietzsche, alas, knew little about). Like Hume, Nietzsche notices that reason underdetermines what humans believe and what they value; and like Hume, he thinks the explanation for human beliefs and values must be sought in non-rational dispositions characteristic of creatures like us. (Unlike Hume, he does not think the non-rational dispositions that actually explain our beliefs and values tend to vindicate them.) Nietzsche’s own speculative ‘science’ of human nature owed much to what he learned from his readings of the German Materialists and from Schopenhauer, as well as his own unparalleled gifts at psychological observation. Central to Nietzsche’s naturalism about persons was his general conception of the mind and of agency. According to Nietzsche, (1)  conscious mental states are largely (perhaps wholly) epiphenomenal; therefore (2) the conscious experience of willing misleads us as 2 

See Katsafanas (2013) for useful discussion.

192   Brian Leiter to the actual genesis of our actions; (3) actions, as well as the conscious evaluative beliefs that precede them, arise from unconscious psychological processes, especially affective or emotional ones, of which we are, at most, only dimly aware; and, given (1) through (3), Nietzsche believes that (4) no one is morally responsible for his or her actions. Let us say a few words about each of these distinctive theses in turn. ‘Consciousness is a surface [Oberfläche]’ (EH II: 9), and it is a surface that conceals what is actually causally efficacious in our mental lives, namely, our unconscious mental states, especially our affects and drives. When we talk of the ‘will’ or of the ‘motive’ that precedes an action we are referring to ‘error[s]‌’ and ‘phantoms’, ‘merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness—something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them’ (TI VI: 3). Only our ‘ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness’ (GS: 11) leads us to fail to recognize that ‘the greatest part of our spirit’s activity . . . remains unconscious and unfelt’ (GS: 333), that ‘everything of which we become conscious . . . causes nothing’ (WP: 478). There is some debate in the scholarly literature about the extent and character of the epiphenomenal nature of conscious mental life according to Nietzsche (see Leiter 2002: 91–5; Katsafanas 2005; Riccardi 2013), but the most plausible interpretation is that while we are aware in consciousness (both conscious perception and conscious cognition) of various things and ideas, these mental states are only efficacious in action in virtue of being internalized into unconscious mental processes. (Interestingly, this view has been supported by much recent work in cognitive science, e.g. Wegner 2002 and Rosenthal 2005; for discussion in relation to Nietzsche, see Leiter 2007 and especially Riccardi 2013.) Of course, if the conscious mental states that precede action are not causally efficacious, then that means our conscious experience of willing an action is also misleading. ‘[T]‌he feeling of will [may] suffice[] for’ a person ‘to assume cause and effect’ (GS 127) as Nietzsche notes, but this assumption is faulty. As Nietzsche puts it, in one of his more dramatic denials of freedom of the will: We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: ‘I will that the sun shall rise’; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says, ‘I will that it shall roll’; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: ‘here I lie, but I will lie here!’ But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression ‘I will’? (D 124)

Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche’s answer to this last rhetorical question is in the negative. His key insight is that ‘a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want’ (BGE 17), and that includes the thoughts associated with willing. If the ‘willing thought’ that precedes an action is itself causally determined by something else, then in what sense do I will the action? Nietzsche is quite clear that one does not, even in a late work like Twilight of the Idols: We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing . . . Nor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought—as ‘motives’: else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? That the ‘I’ causes the thought? (TI VI: 3)

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   193 But it is, of course, Nietzsche who denies that ‘I’ cause my thoughts. He soon makes clear, in the same section, the import of this denial: ‘The “inner world” is full of phantoms’, he says, and ‘the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything . . . it merely accompanies events. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness’. There are no conscious mental causes at all, he concludes (TI VI: 3) (cf. Leiter 2007 for detailed discussion). Unsurprisingly, this scepticism about the causal efficacy of what we experience as the will leads Nietzsche to conclude that no one is morally responsible for his actions, an idea he endorses throughout his philosophical career. So, for example, in the early 1880s, he writes: Do I have to add that the wise Oedipus was right that we really are not responsible for our dreams—but just as little for our waking life, and that the doctrine of freedom of will has human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother? (D 128)

We may have other motives for thinking ourselves free, but we are as little responsible for what we do in real life as what we do in our dreams. It is hard to imagine a more bracing denial of freedom and responsibility. The same themes are sounded in one of his very last works, The Antichrist: Formerly man was given a ‘free will’ as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will away altogether, in the sense that we no longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word ‘will’ now serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will no longer ‘acts’ [wirkt] or ‘moves’ [bewegt]. (A 14)

Denial of the causality of ‘the will’ (more precisely, what we experience as willing) is central, as we have just seen, to Nietzsche’s scepticism about free will. It also explains why he frequently denies ‘unfree will’ as well: what we experience as ‘will’ does not, in fact, cause our actions, so the causal determination or freedom of this will is irrelevant. If the faculty of the will ‘no longer “acts” or “moves” ’ (A 14)—if it is no longer causal—then there remains no conceptual space for the compatabilist idea that the right kind of causal determination of the will is compatible with responsibility for our actions. If, as Zarathustra puts it, ‘thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them’ (Z I, ‘On the Pale Criminal’), then there is no room for moral responsibility: I may well identify with my ‘thoughts’ or my will, but if they do not cause my actions, how could that make me responsible for them? How, one might ask, does Nietzsche’s famous rhetoric about the ‘will to power’ square with this picture of mind and agency? Nietzsche does think he can discern a tendency in human action towards power, which, following the influential account in Richardson (1996), is most plausibly understood as a tendency of each drive in the human psyche to try to dominate the others, to redirect their psychic energy towards the dominant drive’s ends, whatever they may be. Sometimes, of course, Nietzsche casts the idea of will to power in psychologistic terms that would make it the natural opponent of psychological hedonism, that is, rather than seeking feelings of pleasure, ‘every animal . . . instinctively strives for . . . his maximum feeling of power [Machtgefühl]’ (GM III: 7). On either rendering—as the tendency of all drives to dominate others, or as a desire for the feeling of power—it represents a psychological hypothesis that is

194   Brian Leiter supposed to be explanatory of observed behaviour.3 Yet Nietzsche frequently asserts that we are in the dark about the real genesis of our actions. As he writes in Daybreak, ‘The primeval delusion still lives on that one knows, and knows quite precisely in every case, how human action is brought about’, yet the reality is that ‘all actions are essentially unknown’ (D 116). Indeed:  However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment [Ernährung] remain wholly unknown to him. (D 119)

Yet Nietzsche is confident that values ‘belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanisms of our actions, but . . . in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable’ (GS 335). Notice, however, that all these passages are compatible with the hypothesis that we can know, from the third-person perspective, that, whatever the particular mechanism, whatever the particular drives, at play in individual human actions, they manifest a general pattern, namely, that particular drives try to gain dominion over all other drives in the psyche and that, in many instances, that phenomenon is associated with a feeling of power. That is enough for Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power. Nietzsche’s famous method of ‘genealogy’ is also a key part of his naturalistic approach to morality and to human beings. Nietzsche thinks of genealogy as history correctly practiced (cf. Nehamas 1985: 246 n. 1), and as correctly practiced it reveals contemporary phenomena that might seem to have an atemporal status (e.g. the demands of morality as we understand them) or supernatural origin (e.g. morality as God’s commands) to have, in fact, complicated natural histories, in which a variety of differing human purposes are at work (cf. Leiter 2002: 166–73). Genealogy also avoids the ahistorical mistake of thinking that some institution’s or practice’s current meaning or value necessarily explains why that institution or practice originally came into being. Thus, most famously, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche shows that our current moral views arose from an historical process that included, inter alia, the efforts of oppressed classes in the late Roman Empire to score a victory over their oppressors by reconceptualizing their lives as morally reprehensible; the internalization of cruelty that is a precondition for civilized life, which gives rise to a capacity for ‘conscience’; and the role of ‘ascetic’ moralities—like the moralities of all the world’s major religions, which preach denial of basic human desires for sexual gratification, cruelty, and power—in rendering suffering meaningful and thus making life bearable for the majority of mortals. Nietzsche is explicit that he deploys the genealogical method in order to critique morality, though he also notes it is ‘one means among many’ for doing so (e.g. GM Pref: 5). 3 

Mostly in work he never published, Nietzsche presents ‘will to power’ as an ambitious metaphysical thesis about the nature of all reality. As Clark (1990: 212–27) argues, however, the most important treatment of will to power as a metaphysical thesis that Nietzsche publishes occurs in a context (the first chapter of BGE) in which he has just finished criticizing philosophers for propounding metaphysical doctrines as post-hoc rationalizations for their evaluative commitments. It would be extraordinary if Nietzsche would then turn around and do the same thing, without irony!

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   195 But how can a genealogy have any critical import? Nietzsche recognizes and repudiates what we now call the genetic fallacy; he says, for example, that ‘[e]‌ven if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact would not so much as touch the problem of its value’ (GS 345). Instead, Nietzsche uses genealogy to make two kinds of critical points. First, as we will see in section 10.4, central to Nietzsche’s objection to morality is that its demands have a deleterious effect on the flourishing of exceptional individuals. The origin of a morality, however, has a special evidential status as to the effects (or causal powers) of that morality, for example, as to whether morality obstructs or promotes human flourishing. On Nietzsche’s view, moralities (except in cases of false consciousness) are adopted for prudential reasons, that is, because they are in the interests of certain types of people. On Nietzsche’s Calliclean picture, persons adopt moralities for self-interested reasons, because each ‘instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions in which fully to release his power’ (GM III: 7). Thus, people would not have adopted a morality in the first place if its effect wasn’t to produce ‘favourable conditions in which’ they can ‘release [their] power’. That is, morality must have the creation of those conditions in which certain types of people flourish as one of its effects. As Nietzsche puts it in the Nachlass: Thus in the history of morality a will to power finds expression, through which now the slaves and oppressed, now the ill-constituted and those who suffer from themselves, now the mediocre attempt to make those value judgments prevail that are favorable to them. (WP 400; cf. BGE 187; Z I: 15; WP 134, 254, 258, 675)

If this is right, then it follows that insight into the origin of our morality gives us insight into its causal powers: namely, that it favours the flourishing of certain kinds of persons, and thwarts the flourishing of other kinds. The genealogy of morality is, of course, but one way of discovering this fact: for we discover, in the Genealogy, that, at its origin, our morality (because of its distinctive effects) was in the interests of the weak, base, and wretched. If that was its effect, then perhaps that is its effect now? Genealogy supports another line of critique for Nietzsche, as when he observes that by revealing the ‘shameful origin’ of morality, the Genealogy simply brings ‘a feeling of diminution in value of the thing that originated thus and prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward it’ (WP 254; cf. GS 345; second emphasis added). We can state the point more formally. If it turns out that our moral beliefs arise from an epistemically unreliable process—for example, the desire of oppressed peoples to seek revenge against their oppressors—then that fact gives us reason to wonder whether the resulting beliefs are warranted (cf. Sinhababu 2007). Suppose, for example, an acquaintance recommends a restaurant in glowing terms, making it sound almost too good to believe. One then learns that the origin of the acquaintance’s enthusiasm for this restaurant is that he is a part-owner of the establishment. The origin does not, to be sure, refute the acquaintance’s reasons to patronize the restaurant, but the discovery of this ‘shameful origin’ surely ‘prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward[s]‌’ these reasons. One will revisit the reasons with a sceptical eye, knowing what one now knows about the origin. So, too, Nietzsche clearly hopes that the readers of the Genealogy will stand ready to revisit (indeed, revalue) morality given what his naturalistic account shows them about its origin and its effects.

196   Brian Leiter

10.4  Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality and the Aesthetic ‘Justification’ of Existence Nietzsche’s two central concerns are the problem of suffering, posed by Schopenhauer, and the ‘revaluation of values’ as he called it, meaning, in particular, a critique of the dominant morality. The problem of suffering, recall, is the problem of how life can be ‘justified’ in the face of the terrible truth that suffering, loss, pain, and ultimately oblivion await us all, as well as everyone we care about. Most of Nietzsche’s writing, however, is devoted to attacking ‘morality’ (Moral). We shall return in a later section to the connection between these two dominant themes. Let us start with the critique of morality. Nietzsche does not, needless to say, reject every code of conduct governing human interactions that one might call ‘moral,’ so it will be helpful (following Leiter 2002: 74) to introduce the term ‘morality in the pejorative sense’ (MPS) to pick out those values to which Nietzsche centrally objects. Nietzsche’s critique of MPS proceeds on two fronts. On the one hand, he attacks as false (as we have seen) certain assumptions about human agency that undergird MPS, assumptions, for example, about freedom of the will and moral responsibility (for more detail, cf. Leiter 2002: 80–112; see also, Robertson 2012). But Nietzsche’s main objections do not pertain to these mistakes about the true nature of mind and action: that is, ‘[i]‌t is not error as error that’ he objects to fundamentally in MPS (EH IV: 7), although Nietzsche’s two most frequently named—and closely related—targets, Christian and Kantian morality, share such assumptions about agency. Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is that it is harmful to the highest human beings, the exemplars of human excellence whom Nietzsche values above all others. ‘The demand of one morality for all’, he says, ‘is detrimental to the higher men’ (BGE 228), and that is because the prevalent morality, MPS, is in the interests of the ‘herd’, the lower types of human beings. In the preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche sums up his basic concern particularly well: What if a symptom of regression lurked in the ‘good,’ likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present lived at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style, more basely?—So that morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor [Mächtigkeit und Pracht] possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers? (GM Pref: 6)

The theme is sounded throughout Nietzsche’s work. In a book of 1880, for example, he writes that, ‘Our weak, unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a strong civilization’ (D 163). Similarly, in a posthumously published note of 1885, he remarks that ‘men of great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding, will be sought in vain today’ because ‘nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution . . . than what in Europe today is called simply “morality” ’ (WP 957). In these and many other passages (e.g. BGE 62; GM III: 14; A: 5, 24; EH IV: 4; WP 274, 345, 400, 870, 879), Nietzsche makes plain his fundamental objection to MPS: MPS thwarts the

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   197 development of human excellence, that is, ‘the highest power and splendor possible to the type man.’ According to Nietzsche, MPS accomplishes this pernicious end by valorizing attributes and actions (e.g. happiness, altruism, equality, pity) that are harmful to the flourishing of ‘higher men’ (as Nietzsche calls them) and demonizing (or deeming unvaluable) attributes that are essential to their flourishing (e.g. suffering, severe self-love, inequality, indifference to suffering).4 In the case of what MPS valorizes, Nietzsche argues either that the attributes and actions have no intrinsic value (when MPS claims they do) or that they do not have any extrinsic value (for the realization of human excellence). With respect to what MPS demonizes or devalues, Nietzsche argues only that these actions and attributes are, in fact, extrinsically valuable for the cultivation of human excellence (see Leiter 2002: 127–36). Throughout, his critique depends on a kind of speculative moral psychology about how certain values affect human development, a critique which we may illustrate with one example here. What could be harmful about the seemingly innocuous MPS valorization of ‘happiness’ and devaluation of suffering? An early remark of Nietzsche’s suggests his answer: Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections? (D 174)

In a later work, Nietzsche says—referring to hedonists and utilitarians—that, ‘Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible’ (BGE 225). By the hedonistic doctrine of well-being, Nietzsche takes the utilitarians to have in mind ‘English happiness’, namely, ‘comfort and fashion’ (BGE 228)—a construal which, if unfair to some utilitarians (like Mill), may do justice to ordinary aspirations to happiness. In a similar vein, Nietzsche has Zarathustra dismiss ‘wretched contentment’ as an ideal (Z Pref: 3), while also revealing that it was precisely ‘the last men’—the ‘most despicable men’—who ‘invented happiness [Glück]’ in the first place (Pref: 5). To be sure, Nietzsche allows that he himself and the ‘free spirits’ will be ‘cheerful’ or ‘gay’ [fröhlich]—they are, after all, the proponents of the ‘gay science’. His point is that such ‘happiness’ is not criterial of being a higher person, and thus it is not something that the higher person—in contrast to the adherent of MPS—aims for. Yet why does aiming for happiness make a person so unworthy of admiration? Nietzsche’s answer appears to be: because suffering is positively necessary for the cultivation of human excellence. He writes, for example, that: The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (BGE 225; cf. BGE 270)

4 

See, for example, D 108, 132, 174; GS 116, 294, 328, 338, 345, 352, 377; Z I:4, II: 8, III: 1, 9, IV: 13, 10; BGE 197, 198, 201–2, 225, 257; GM Pref: 5, III: 11 ff.; TI II, V, IX: 35, 37–8, 48; A: 7, 43; EH III: D-2, IV: 4, 7–8; WP 752.

198   Brian Leiter Nietzsche is not arguing here that suffering is really intrinsically valuable (MPS does not claim that either). The value of suffering, according to Nietzsche, is only extrinsic: suffering—‘great’ suffering—is a prerequisite of any great human achievement. As Nietzsche puts the point elsewhere: ‘Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit . . . I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound’ (GS Pref: 3). We should remember that Nietzsche is primarily a critic of moral culture, not simply of particular moral philosophies. He believes that when MPS values come to dominate a culture, they will influence the attitudes of all its members, and thus influence how individuals with the potential for great achievements will understand, evaluate and conduct their own lives. (This influence, of course, operates sub-rationally and often not even consciously.) If, in fact, suffering is a precondition for these individuals to do anything great, and if they have internalized the norm that suffering must be alleviated, and that happiness is the ultimate goal, then we run the risk that, rather than—to put it crudely—suffer and create, they will instead waste their energies pursuing pleasure, lamenting their suffering and seeking to alleviate it. MPS values may not explicitly prohibit artists or other potentially ‘excellent’ persons from ever suffering; but the risk is that a culture—like ours—which has internalized the norms against suffering and for pleasure will be a culture in which potential artists—and other doers of great things—will, in fact, squander themselves in self-pity and the seeking of pleasure. Thus, Nietzsche’s aim is to free such nascent higher human beings from their ‘false consciousness’ about MPS, their false belief that it is good, rather than harmful, for them. Who are these higher human beings who manifest human excellence according to Nietzsche?5 Nietzsche has three favourite examples throughout his corpus:  Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself! What makes these figures paradigms of the ‘higher’ type for Nietzsche—beyond their great creativity (as he says, ‘the men of great creativity’ are ‘the really great men according to my understanding’ (WP 957))—are a variety of attributes (see Leiter 2002:  116–22). ‘Every choice human being’, says Nietzsche, ‘strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority’ (BGE 26). Unsurprisingly, then, the great or higher man lacks the ‘congeniality’ and ‘good-naturedness’ so often celebrated in contemporary popular culture. ‘A great man . . . is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar’ (WP 962). More than that, though, the higher type deals with others (when he has to) in a rather distinctive way: ‘A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary resting place’ (BGE 273). Thus, ‘a great man . . . wants no “sympathetic” heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always intent on making something out of them’ (WP 962). The great man approaches others instrumentally not only because of his fundamental proclivity for solitude, but because he is consumed by his work, his responsibilities, his projects. ‘What is noble?’ Nietzsche again asks in a Nachlass note of 1888. His answer: ‘That one instinctively seeks heavy responsibilities’ (WP 944). So it was with Goethe: ‘he was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself’ 5  Note that while Nietzsche speaks in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the ‘superman’ as a kind of ideal higher type, this concept simply drops out of his mature work (except for a brief mention in EH in the context of discussing Zarathustra). ‘Higher men’ is an important concept in Nietzsche; the ‘superman’ is nothing more than a rhetorical trope in Zarathustra.

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   199 (TI IX: 49). But the higher type does not seek out responsibilities and tasks arbitrarily. ‘A great man’, says Nietzsche, displays ‘a long logic in all of his activity . . . he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him’ (WP 962). This is the trait Nietzsche sometimes refers to as having ‘style’ in ‘character’ (GS 290). (Note that this famous passage (GS 290) merely describes those—‘the strong and domineering natures’—who are able ‘ “to give” style’ to their character; it does not presuppose that just anyone can do so.) Indeed, Nietzsche understood his own life in these terms: [T]‌he organizing ‘idea’ that is destined to rule [in one’s life and work] keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads . . . Considered in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual . . . I never even suspected what was growing in me—and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection. (EH II: 9)

Higher men also embrace what Nietzsche calls the idea of ‘eternal return’. In Beyond Good and Evil, he describes ‘the opposite ideal’ to that of moralists and pessimists like Schopenhauer as ‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity’ (BGE 56). He thus evinces what Nietzsche often calls a ‘Dionysian’ or ‘life-affirming’ attitude, that is, he is willing to affirm his life unconditionally, including, in particular, the ‘suffering’ or other hardships it has involved. (Someone who says, ‘I would gladly live my life again, except for my first marriage’, would not affirm life in the requisite sense.) Thus, we may say that a person affirms his life in Nietzsche’s sense only insofar as he would gladly will its eternal return: that is, will the repetition of his entire life through eternity.6 Nietzsche calls ‘the idea of the eternal recurrence’ the ‘highest formulation of affirmation that is at all attainable’ (EH III: Z-1; cf. BGE 56). Strikingly, Nietzsche claims that precisely this attitude characterized both himself and Goethe (cf. EH III: CW-4; TI IX: 49). Finally, higher human beings have a certain distinctive self-regard. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche once again answers the question, ‘What is noble?’, this time as follows: ‘It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank . . .: some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble soul has reverence [Ehrfurcht] for itself ’ (BGE 287). Self-reverence—to revere and respect oneself as one might a god—is no small achievement, as the proliferation of ‘self-help’ programmes and pop psychology slogans like ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ would suggest. Self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-laceration are the norm among human beings; to possess a ‘fundamental certainty’ about oneself is, Nietzsche thinks quite plausibly, a unique state of affairs. ‘The noble human being’, says Nietzsche, also ‘honors himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness’ (BGE 260).

6  ‘Will’ in this context means something closer to desire; it is not a sotto voce smuggling back in of the traditional notion of the will as the locus of agency that, as we have seen, Nietzsche critiques.

200   Brian Leiter It should be apparent now why creative geniuses like Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself are the preferred examples of the higher human being: for the characteristics of the higher type so-described are precisely those that lend themselves to artistic and creative work. A penchant for solitude, an absolute devotion to one’s tasks, an indifference to external opinion, a fundamental certainty about oneself and one’s values (that often strikes others as hubris)—all these are the traits we find, again and again, in artistic geniuses. (It turns out, for example, that Beethoven had almost all these characteristics to a striking degree; for discussion, see Leiter 2002: 122–23.) We are finally in a position to see the connection between the flourishing of geniuses like these and the problem of suffering that Nietzsche took over from Schopenhauer. The challenge presented by the latter, recall, was how life could be worth living given the pervasiveness of pointless suffering. The animating idea of Nietzsche’s response remains steady from the beginning to the end of his career: as he puts it in the new 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, ‘the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (BT: Attempt 5). This phrasing echoes famous claims from the original work more than a dozen years earlier: ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (BT 5; cf. BT 24, GS 107). This kind of ‘justification’, whatever precisely it amounts to, is equivalent in Nietzschean terminology to taking a ‘Dionysian’ perspective on life (cf. BT: Attempt 4; EH IV: 9). As Nietzsche puts it in a late work, Twilight of the Idols: ‘Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility . . . that is what I called Dionysian’ (TI Ancient: 5). This Dionysian attitude is plainly an instance of being able to will the eternal return. So how does an aesthetic experience of the world ‘seduc[e]‌one to a continuation of life’ (BT: 3), as Nietzsche puts it, how does it elicit in us a Dionysian attitude? For that is the essence of ‘aesthetic justification’ for Nietzsche, namely, that it makes one want to live, it makes one experience the terrible truth about human suffering not as an objection to life, but as something necessary to it.7 The key here is to appreciate Nietzsche’s understanding of aesthetic value, an account which, unsurprisingly, is articulated in opposition to Kant’s. Kant makes two kinds of mistakes in Nietzsche’s view, one about art, the other about knowledge. Nietzsche writes: ‘Kant intended to honor art when, among the predicates of the beautiful, he privileged and placed in the foreground those that constitute the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity’ (GM III: 6). But ‘impersonality’ and ‘universal validity’ are marks of neither art, nor knowledge. Indeed, Nietzsche ridicules Kant’s idea that the mark of aesthetic value is that it ‘pleases without interest’ (GM III: 6), endorsing instead Stendhal’s formula, namely, that ‘the beautiful promises happiness,’ that is, it produces ‘the arousal [Erregung] of the will (“of interest”)’ (GM III: 6). Nietzsche soon makes the connection between aesthetic and sexual arousal even more explicit two sections later: ‘the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic condition’, he says, ‘might have its origins precisely in . . .“sensuality” [Sinnlichkeit]’ though it is now ‘transfigure[d] and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus’ (GM III: 8). This experience of the ‘sweetness and fullness’ of aesthetic experience is one for which the

7 

We shall ignore the answer Nietzsche gave in his first published work, BT, since he later abandons that particular kind of answer, even as he retains allegiance to the idea that only an aesthetic justification of existence is possible.

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   201 metaphor of ‘seduction’ seems especially apt. ‘Intoxication’ (Rausch) is Nietzsche’s other preferred metaphor for it,8 as in this passage from Twilight: Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no art. . . . Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the most ancient and original form of intoxication. There is also an intoxication that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong affects; an intoxication of the festival, the contest, of the bravura of performance, of victory, of all extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction . . . or under the influence of narcotics. . . . The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength. (TI ‘Skirmishes’: 8)

The characterization of ‘intoxication’ in terms of ‘the feeling of fullness and increasing strength’ echoes the characterization of aesthetic experience from the Genealogy noted earlier. In both cases, the experience stimulates what we might call ‘feelings of aliveness’, counteracting therefore the depressant effect of confrontation with the terrible truths about existence. ‘Art is the great stimulus to life’, as Nietzsche says in Twilight (‘Skirmishes’: 24), but it achieves this in the same way that sexual arousal and intoxication do: by creating certain powerful feelings with a positive valence, feelings that stimulate the subject and attract him to life. Aesthetic experience, in short, is arousing, it produces a sublimated form of sexual pleasure. And it is surely constitutive of a pleasurable experience, sexual or otherwise, that it attracts us. I shall refer to this as Nietzsche’s minimal hedonic thesis, according to which pleasurable experience draws us towards its object, rather than away from it. That is, of course, compatible with other motivations dominating the minimal hedonic one, and also compatible with objects incompatible with hedonic experience also attracting us. But the hypothesis on offer is that, per the minimal hedonic thesis, aesthetic experience produces affective arousal sufficient to thwart the nihilistic impulse, the impulse to give up on life because of the terrible truths about it. But what aesthetic value could life possibly exemplify such that it produces the pleasurable effect of Dionysian ecstasy that sustains our attachment to life? Here is the crucial connection with Nietzsche’s critique of morality:  in a culture in which moral norms predominate, nascent creative geniuses like Goethe and Beethoven will not realize their potential. And if they fail to realize their potential, then we shall be deprived of what we may call the ‘spectacle of genius’, that is, the spectacle of human achievement that induces aesthetic pleasure, whether in the clearly aesthetic realm (for example, Beethoven) or on the historical stage (for example, Napoleon). Life without music is a ‘mistake’, Nietzsche famously says in an aphorism from Twilight, and the point can be generalized: life without the spectacle of genius could not arouse aesthetic pleasure, and so would deprive us of a ‘justification’ for existence, that is, a desire to live and enjoy that aesthetic experience. Since suffering is essential for the realization of genius—as we learned from Nietzsche’s speculative moral psychology—the 8  There is a helpful discussion of pertinent passages about Rausch in Richardson (2004: 229ff.). As Richardson writes, ‘something is beautiful [according to Nietzsche] if and only if it can (or does) produce Rausch’ (230). Less plausibly, and with insufficient textual evidence, Richardson tries to connect this to a selectionist theory of aesthetic experience, but the adequacy of that hypothesis does not matter for my purposes.

202   Brian Leiter ‘justification’ of existence in the sense just described will require the affirmation of suffering as well.

10.5  Truth, Knowledge, and Perspectivism We come finally to one of the more perplexing aspects of Nietzsche’s writings, his various remarks about truth and knowledge. Even if we put to one side a very early essay that he never published (probably wisely) called ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’,9 it is still the case that his ‘perspectivism’ (as it is commonly known) poses interpretive difficulties. The difficulty arises from the fact that, on the one hand, Nietzsche makes claims that seem to deny that any perspective on the world has any epistemic privilege over any other, that is, has objectively more warrant or justification; and that, on the other hand, he repeatedly makes claims for which he appears to profess an epistemic privilege, that is, he appears to maintain that they constitute knowledge and so, among other things, must be true. So, on the sceptical side, he claims that ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’ (WP 481), which echoes his remark in published work that even if his claim about will to power ‘is only an interpretation too—. . . . well, then, so much the better’ (BGE 22).10 A few sections later in the same work, he asserts that ‘the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of’ (BGE 34), an assertion that, however, seems to suppose that we know one ‘fact’! In The Gay Science, in a famous passage on ‘perspectivism’, he declares that ‘we have no organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be useful, in the interest of the human herd, the species’ (GS 354). And in the most famous passage on perspectivism in the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes that ‘[t]‌here is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing” ’ though he adds that the more ‘affects’ (or interests) we bring to bear on an object, ‘the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be’ (GM III: 12) (the quotation marks on ‘objectivity’ are Nietzsche’s). Despite these sceptical-sounding remarks, Nietzsche also announces that, ‘All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses’ (BGE 134), and that ‘reality is not encountered at all’ unless we ‘accept the testimony of the senses’, which means that metaphysics and theology do not give us knowledge of reality (TI III: 3). In passages like these, Nietzsche sounds more like a logical positivist than a postmodern sceptic. So too Nietzsche’s naturalism, noted earlier, leads him to claim repeatedly that naturalistic explanations for phenomena are epistemically superior to alternatives. So, for example, he complains that moral and religious explanations appeal only to ‘imaginary causes’ (TI VI: 6), and thus ‘believ[e]‌in realities which are no realities’ (TI VII: 1). Or similarly elsewhere: ‘in Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality’ (A: 15). 9  For doubts about the cogency of the argument of this early essay, and evidence that Nietzsche changed his view significantly thereafter, see Clark (1990). 10  In context, it is clear the target here is a kind of phenomenalist ‘positivism, which halts at phenomena’ (WP 481). That kind of phenomenalism is widely rejected, of course.

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   203 How are we to reconcile the apparently sceptical-sounding remarks in some of the passages just quoted with Nietzsche’s apparent confidence in the correctness of natural as opposed to religious or moral explanations of phenomena? We may distinguish three possible readings. First, perhaps perspectivism just is Protagoreanism, that is, an endorsement of the most radical form of relativism associated with the Protagorean dictum ‘man is the measure of all things’. All claims about what is true and knowable have no objective standing at all, they are all dependent on the perspective of the person making the claim. We have already seen evidence that Nietzsche thinks all evaluative judgments are affective, that is, products of the non-rational emotional responses persons have to different states of affairs. But Nietzsche, as we have also seen, believes that nature itself ‘is value-less’ and that all value (Werthe) is ‘bestowed’ by humans onto this value-free nature (GS 301). But judgments about what we ought to believe in light of the evidence also depend on values—norms for what we ought to believe—and it is hard to see why those values should be exempt from Nietzschean scepticism. All knowing is, after all, as Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy passage on perspectivism (GM III: 12), animated by affects (or interests), so how could it claim to be epistemically special or reliable? Notice, of course, that the target here is explicitly epistemic, suggesting that norms of epistemic warrant answer to interests and affects that, themselves, have no independent standing as reliable trackers of the truth. But that would mean that there could be an objective truth, but it would forever be beyond the ken of affective knowers like us! Nietzsche’s view then would combine a kind of Protagoreanism about knowledge with a kind of naturalized Kantianism about what is true or real—what is true or real is beyond our ken because of the psychological facts that condition our ‘knowledge’ of the world. That kind of reading would be hard to square with Nietzsche’s professed scepticism about the Kantian distinction between the world as it appears, and the world as it really is ‘in-itself’ (see Leiter 1994: 338), and it also imposes an interpretive burden to explain away all of Nietzsche’s empiricist and naturalistic claims which typically sound as if he thinks they represent an epistemically privileged view of reality. Still, as I wrote nearly 20 years ago, this kind of Protagorean reading might maintain that ‘in best Sophistic fashion, [Nietzsche] appreciates the rhetorical value of epistemically loaded—but semantically empty—language’, and so this reading has to be a live possibility, though one that still awaits a persuasive defence (1994: 339).11 More common in the secondary literature has been a different strategy, namely, trying to ‘explain away’ not Nietzsche’s apparent epistemic confidence in empiricism and naturalism, but rather the apparently sceptical import of his remarks about perspectivism (Clark 1990 is the locus classicus, though see Clark 1998 for modifications; cf. Leiter 1994 for a related account). On Maudemarie Clark’s influential and subtle reading, Nietzsche began his philosophical career as a Neo-Kantian, who thought that all knowledge is of the phenomenal world—the world as it appears to cognizers like us—and thus everything we believed about the world necessarily falsified reality as it is ‘in-itself’, since, of course, we could know nothing of the noumenal world. Gradually, Nietzsche came to abandon the

11 

Meyer (2014) defends a kind of Protagorean reading of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, though one he argues is compatible with a naturalism that privileges the relationalist ontology that is supported by what Nietzsche took to be the best science of his day.

204   Brian Leiter idea of the thing-in-itself as incoherent, and thus in his final works realized there were no grounds for thinking empirical knowledge of the world ‘falsified’ a reality-in-itself that didn’t even exist. At that point, he became an unabashed naturalist and empiricist. Scholars, however, have questioned whether Nietzsche really abandons the idea that our claims about the world falsify it (e.g. Anderson 1996). One of the key passages for Clark’s interpretation is Nietzsche’s own accounting of the evolution of his views on these topics in Twilight of the Idols, where he writes about ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’. Here Nietzsche lays out, in six stages, the ‘error’ of our belief in (to use Kantian terminology) the noumenal realm (the ‘true world’ of the title). In this history, the crucial moments come in Nietzsche’s stages 4 and 5:

4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? 5. The ‘true’ world—an idea which is no longer useful for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

Notice, however, that the grounds for ‘abolishing’ the idea of the noumenal world given here are not, for example, that it is unintelligible, or that reality is necessarily perspectival, but rather that the idea of such a world is not ‘useful’. This suggests a third possible reading, which we might call ‘pragmatic’. Perhaps, the pragmatic reading says, there is a way things really are as seen from no perspective at all; but the possibility of such a world makes no difference to us, since we can know nothing about it. Practically speaking, what Kant calls the ‘phenomenal’ world is all that matters. This certainly seems to be Nietzsche’s posture in the passage from Twilight, and it is at least consistent with the epistemic emphasis of GM III: 12, which, like the view described here, is officially agnostic about the (metaphysical) question of the existence of the noumenal world. This would also fit nicely with the fact that Nietzsche’s primary objections are to the practical consequences of acknowledging the existence of a world beyond our cognitive ken, not to the existence of such a world. As he puts it in the Nachlass: ‘It is of cardinal importance that one should abolish the true [i.e. noumenal] world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of the world we are: it has been our most dangerous attempt yet to assassinate life’ (WP 583; cf. Poellner 2001: 115–19). He makes the same point even more clearly in a series of four ‘propositions’ from Twilight of the Idols written around the same time as the Nachlass passage; I quote only the two most relevant ones: Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed on the ‘true being’ of things are the criteria of non-being, of naught; the ‘true world’ has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world. . . . Third proposition. To invent fables about a world ‘other’ than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of ‘another,’ a ‘better’ life. (TI III: 6)

These are, again, practical objections to the idea of a ‘true’ world, not metaphysical ones. Thus, on this third reading, the sceptical remarks in Nietzsche pertain to the pernicious

Nietzsche (1844–1900)   205 idea of a ‘true’ world beyond our cognitive grasp, but with respect to the world we can know, naturalistic and empiricist methods reign supreme. These do not exhaust the possibilities. Recently, for example, Nietzsche has been read as a thorough-going Pyrrhonian sceptic (e.g. Berry 2011), a reading which sheds interesting light on many portions of the corpus, though, again, has difficulty with Nietzsche’s confident endorsement of naturalistic claims. A different possibility, noted, for example, in Gemes (1992), is that Nietzsche, self-taught as he was in philosophy, should not be thought to have coherent or sensible views on general questions of metaphysics and epistemology, which were not, in any case, his real interest. His real concern was in the overestimation of the value of truth in the post-Socratic world, a theme Nietzsche treats from The Birth of Tragedy through the Genealogy. Since questions of value are the dominant questions in his corpus, and arguably where Nietzsche’s greatest insights lay, perhaps we should dispense with the attempt to reconstruct a Nietzschean theory of truth or knowledge altogether. I find myself increasingly sympathetic to that view.12

Bibliography References to Nietzsche I have consulted a variety of existing English translations by Walter Kaufmann, R.  J. Hollingdale, or Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (except as noted, in this section, for the material in Philosophy and Truth), and then made modifications based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke:  Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980); where there is no existing English edition, the translation is my own. Nietzsche’s works are cited as follows, unless otherwise noted: roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in Nietzsche’s works; Arabic numerals refer to sections, not pages. I use the standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, as follows: The Antichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); The Gay Science (GS); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTAG); Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. & trans. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979) (PT, cited by page number); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); The Will to Power (WP).

Other References Anderson, R. Lanier. 1996. ‘Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy’, Nietzsche-Studien 25: 307–41. Berry, Jessica. 2011. Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (New  York:  Oxford University Press). Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press).

12 

Thanks to Justin Coates and Michael Forster for comments on an earlier draft.

206   Brian Leiter Clark, Maudemarie. 1998. ‘On Knowledge, Truth and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism’, in C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gemes, Ken. 1992. ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth’, reprinted in Richardson & Leiter (eds.) (2001), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Janz, Curt Paul. 1978/9. Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie (3 volumes). Munich: Hanser. Katsafanas, Paul. 2005. ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization’, European Journal of Philosophy 13: 1–31. Katsafanas, Paul. 2013. ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Leiter, Brian. 1994. ‘Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press). Leiter, Brian. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge). Leiter, Brian. 2007. ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will’, Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (September 2007): 1–15. Leiter, Brian. 2013. ‘Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered’, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Leiter, Brian. 2014. ‘The Truth is Terrible’, in D. Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Value of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Meyer, Matthew. 2014. Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction (Berlin: de Gruyter). Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche:  Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press). Poellner, Peter. 2001. ‘Perspectival Truth’, in Richardson & Leiter (eds.) (2001), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Riccardi, Mattia. 2013. ‘Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness’, in M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind (Berlin: de Gruyter). Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Richardson, John. 2004. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Richardson, John and Brian Leiter (eds.). 2001. Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Robertson, Simon. 2012. ‘The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway & S. Robertson (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rosenthal, David. 2005. Consciousness and Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Sinhababu, Neil. 2007. ‘Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology’, in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wegner, Daniel. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

Chapter 11

Fr ege (184 8–1925) Patricia A. Blanchette 11.1 Introduction Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was born on November 8, 1848 in the Hanseatic town of Wismar. He was educated in mathematics at the University of Jena and at the University of Göttingen, from which latter he received his doctorate in 1873. He defended his Habilitation the next year in Jena, and took up a position immediately at the University of Jena. Here he spent his entire academic career, lecturing in mathematics and logic, retiring in 1918. His death came on July 26, 1925 in the nearby town of Bad Kleinen.1 Frege is best known for three significant contributions to philosophy. The first is his development of modern quantified logic, a contribution as much to mathematics as to philosophy. The second is his pursuit of the thesis of logicism, the thesis that arithmetic (including the classical theory of the real numbers) is part of pure logic. The third is Frege’s account of the nature of language, including his noteworthy claim that there are two kinds of meaning possessed by virtually all significant pieces of language, commonly known in English as the sense and the reference of those pieces of language. The three contributions are closely connected, and can best be understood by following their parallel development throughout the course of Frege’s work. Following a brief overview of the three contributions, this chapter will proceed roughly chronologically to explore their interaction over the course of Frege’s major works.

11.1.1 Logicism Frege’s logicism is the thesis that arithmetic (by which Frege means the usual theories of natural numbers, integers, and real numbers, but not including geometry) is 1  See Lothar Kreiser, Gottlob Frege: Leben, Werk, Zeit, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001). Also see: Nikolay Milkov, “Frege in Context,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (3) 2001: 557–70; Gottfried Gabriel and Wolfgang Kienzler (eds.), Frege in Jena. Beiträge zur Spurensicherung (Kritisches Jahrbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997); Gottfried Gabriel and Uwe Dathe (eds.), Gottlob Frege. Werk und Wirkung (Paderborn: Mentis, 2000); Christian Thiel and Michael Beaney, “Frege’s Life and Work” in Michael Beaney and Erich Reck (eds.), Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers Vol. I, Routledge 2005.

208   Patricia A. Blanchette part of logic. As Frege understands it, the truth of his version of logicism would imply that arithmetical truths are objective, in the sense of having no dependence on human mathematical (or other) activities, and that they are analytic, in a sense close enough to Kant’s that the truth of logicism so understood would entail that Kant is wrong about arithmetic. Though the logicist project was later taken up by modern empiricists, Frege’s reasons for favoring it were not empiricist. His view was that arithmetical truth is clearly more deeply grounded than are any forms of synthetic knowledge, and that this depth, and an associated certainty and unrevisability, give good reason to take arithmetic to be grounded directly in logic. Motivation aside, Frege’s central view is that his logicist thesis is susceptible to direct demonstration, of a rigorous kind. This demonstration was to have consisted in (i)  a thorough analysis of fundamental arithmetical truths and of their components, and (ii) a proof of those fundamental truths, so analyzed, from purely-logical premises. The attempt to carry out this demonstration occupies a substantial part of Frege’s research from 1879 through at least 1903, and involves as a crucial component the development of a formal system of quantified logic. That system embodies for the first time the principles that form the heart of modern logic today. Frege’s attempt to demonstrate the truth of logicism was a failure. As he learned via a letter from Bertrand Russell in 1902, one of the principles that he, Frege, had taken to be a basic principle of logic was in fact paradoxical. This meant, for reasons that will be detailed, both that Frege’s analyses of arithmetical truths were flawed, and that his attempts to prove arithmetic from logic were unworkable. It also meant that the formal system of logic he presented in his mature work was inconsistent. The inconsistency in the formal system is easily remedied by removing a single problematic principle, but this remedy makes it impossible to use the system to prove the truths of arithmetic. That is to say: while the system salvaged from Frege’s own via the removal of the problematic parts is of considerable importance in its own right as a forerunner of modern logical systems, it is not sufficient for its original purpose, the defense of logicism.

11.1.2  Quantified Logic Frege’s development of a formal system of logic was, as noted in section 11.2, motivated by the attempt to provide extremely rigorous proofs of the fundamental truths of arithmetic. By a “system” of logic we mean: (i) a language in which all of the statements appearing in proofs are to be expressed, together with (ii) a collection of fundamental truths to be taken as axioms in any proofs, and (iii) a collection of inference-rules, that is, rules by means of which truths can be inferred from other truths in order to generate proofs. To say that the system is “formal” is to say that components (i)–(iii) are specified entirely syntactically: what counts as a well-formed sentence, or an axiom, or an instance of an inference-rule, is determined entirely by the symbols and the order in which they appear; one need make no appeal to the meanings of the linguistic items in question in order to determine their status in the system. Frege’s own reason for insisting on the formal presentation of his deductive system was that of rigor: his idea was that a syntactic specification of proof would remove all ambiguity and unclarity, and would ensure that all

Frege (1848–1925)   209 steps taken in a proof were explicitly acknowledged. This is not to say that the formulas of Frege’s formal system were meaningless: on the contrary, each such formula expressed a determinate claim. Frege’s idea was that a syntactically-specified system of proof would give a rigorous way of demonstrating the logical grounding of the claims expressed by its sentences. This fundamental idea, that proofs can be carried out via principles that are specified entirely by means of their syntactic form, has since become a defining characteristic of modern logic. Frege’s system is a system of quantified logic. The fundamental quantifiers are those notions expressed by the terms “all” and “there exist,” and it is the interaction between these notions, and those expressed by “and,” “not,” and “if . . . then,” that explains the validity of a huge swath of valid arguments, both in ordinary reasoning and in mathematics. What’s new in Frege’s logic, in addition to its explicit syntactic implementation, is the accurate treatment of the interaction between quantifiers and the other structural features of arguments. The inference, for example, from “Every even number is less than some odd number” and “2 is even” to “There is an odd number such that 2 is less than it” is a kind of inference handled smoothly by Frege’s and not by prior treatments of logic. The axioms and inference-rules Frege introduces include all of those axioms and rules now familiar as the principles of classical first-order logic, plus two further kinds of principles in virtue of which Frege’s system is importantly richer. The first is the inclusion in Frege’s system of higher-order quantifiers. Though for various reasons the most popular systems of logic in use today do not include these quantifiers (but include only their first-order versions), logics including Frege-style higher-order quantifiers play an important role in both philosophical and mathematical arenas today. The second additional feature of Frege’s formal system in its mature version is that it includes notation for and principles governing what he called value-ranges, a version of the modern idea of sets. On this point Frege’s fundamental idea was flawed; this is the mistake, noted already and described in detail in section 11.2.3, that makes the formal system inconsistent. Formal systems of logic after Frege do not include this principle; his insights concerning value-ranges, subsequently cleaned up so as to avoid paradox, are now pursued via systems of set theory.

11.1.3  Philosophy of Language Though the topic was arguably of secondary interest to Frege himself, he is perhaps best known for his views about language and meaning. Frege’s mature theory of language involves the view that words and sentences typically have two important semantic features, called by Frege the Sinn (“sense”) and the Bedeutung (“reference”) of those linguistic items. Consider an ordinary sentence, say: (A) Alice likes geraniums. One of the important things about this string of symbols is that it can be used, and indeed is typically used, to say something, to make a claim that’s either true or false. Frege’s view is that the claim expressed by this sentence, a claim that’s also expressed by

210   Patricia A. Blanchette other sentences (e.g. by sentences of German and of French) is the important thing to focus on when we’re talking about truth or falsehood. If Alice does in fact like geraniums, then the claim—or, as Frege puts it, the Gedanke (“thought”) expressed by (A)—is true. Thoughts, for Frege, are not mental entities (despite the terminology). The thought that happens to be expressed by (A) is, as he sees it, true; and this does not depend on any person’s having either entertained that idea, or produced that sentence. In Frege’s view, this independence between thoughts and people’s activities is immediately evident once we notice that, for example, Mount Aetna would have been covered in snow even if nobody had ever noticed that it was. That is to say: the thought Mount Aetna is covered in snow, a thought expressible by sentences in many different languages but not dependent on any particular language, is in fact true, and would have been true even if no person had ever seen or imagined that mountain. Thoughts are, in this sense, the primary bearers of truth and falsehood. For similar reasons, they are also the primary bearers of such logical relations as entailment, consistency, inconsistency, and so on. When, having uttered (A), I go on to say “Therefore, someone likes geraniums,” I have noticed, according to Frege, that the thought expressed by (B) Someone likes geraniums follows logically from the thought expressed by (A). Similarly in the domain of arithmetic: when we set about to prove, for example, that 7 + 5 = 12, the thing we prove is not the sentence itself, but the thought it expresses. This forms a crucial part of Frege’s explanation of how researchers who speak different languages can nevertheless be engaged in the same pursuits: they can prove the same theorems, investigate the same questions, and agree or disagree about the same claims. In such cases, the items each investigator is concerned with are thoughts, each of which is expressible via various sentences in different languages. This view of language-meaning extends to parts of sentences. Each part of a sentence (each word or phrase) makes a particular contribution to the thought expressed by that sentence. This contribution is called the “Sinn” (“sense”) of that part. Because the thought expressed by

(i) The morning star is bright

is a different thought from that expressed by (ii) The evening star is bright. Frege concludes that the phrases “the morning star” and “the evening star” have different senses, even though they happen to pick out the same object, the planet Venus. This object, the planet, is what Frege calls the “Bedeutung” (“reference”) of the phrase “the morning star.” (It is also, of course, the reference of “the evening star.”) The pattern established here—in which two singular terms can have the same reference while having different senses—forms a crucial part of Frege’s semantic theory. Both sense and reference are essential to the role of words and phrases in sentences: the sense of a word or phrase is what it contributes to the thought expressed, while the reference is what it contributes to determining the truth-value of that thought. We investigate more fully in section 11.2.2 the nature of senses and references, and their interaction.

Frege (1848–1925)   211

11.2  The Historical Development of Frege’s Work 11.2.1  Early Work: Begriffsschrift and Grundlagen The work of Frege’s that has been most important to philosophers begins with his 1879 monograph entitled “Begriffsschrift: eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens,” familiarly known as “Begriffsschrift.”2 In that work, Frege presents the first version of his formal system of logic. That system contains the formalism for first- and higher-order quantification, but does not contain the problematic notation or axioms for value-ranges. The system is elegant, powerful, and consistent. Begriffsschrift announces the first step in Frege’s logicist program. It raises the question of whether the truths of arithmetic are provable by means of pure logic alone, and points out that the only way to settle this question is to provide clear analyses and rigorous proofs of those truths. The formal system is introduced as the means of presenting the proofs. Frege does not take a position in Begriffsschrift on the answer to the announced question, but makes some important steps towards its resolution. In addition to introducing the formal system for proofs, Frege provides here several crucial analyses of proto-arithmetical notions, including that of the ancestral of a binary relation, and of the notion of following in a series. Having given the analyses, Frege demonstrates that some surprisingly-rich claims regarding series, claims that will later prove pivotal in his analysis of arithmetic, can be proven by means of pure logic. Frege’s views about the nature of logic begin to appear in this early work. Especially significant here is the early appearance of his anti-psychologism, a thesis that animates all of Frege’s further work. The view is that logic is a normative discipline, in the sense that it provides norms for valid reasoning, but that it has no grounding in psychological (or other) facts about human beings. It is, as Frege later puts it, the science of truth: its principles are principles governing the entailment relation that obtains between truths, whether or not people actually manage to reason in accordance with them. The principles of logic are, in short, conceived by Frege here and henceforth as principles against which one might measure the rationality of individual reasoning-processes, but not as descriptions of those processes. Frege’s semantic theory is, in 1879, relatively rudimentary. He holds, as he will continue to hold, that logical entailment is a relation that obtains not between sentences, but between the things expressed by sentences. But in this early work, Frege has not yet introduced the two-tiered semantic theory in which sense is distinguished from reference, and does not yet employ the notion of thought. Here, the things expressed by sentences are known as contents of possible judgment, which contents are determined by the contents of the parts of the sentences in question. As to the nature of the contents of sub-sentential 2  Halle: L. Nebert, 1879. English translation by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg as Begriffsschrift, A Formula Language, Modeled Upon That of Arithmetic, for Pure Thought in van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 5–82.

212   Patricia A. Blanchette pieces of language, Frege does not have much to say in this period, but appears to take the contents of singular terms to be essentially what will later become their references, that is, the objects (e.g. geometric points or numbers) that they stand for. Frege’s next major work is his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations of Arithmetic), published in 1884.3 The primary purpose of this work is to present, in ordinary language (i.e. in German, as opposed to his formal language), Frege’s own analyses of fundamental arithmetical truths, and to sketch the proofs of those truths from logical principles. Here Frege comes down clearly on the side of logicism, and takes this small book to provide the outline of the decisive demonstration of that thesis. En route to presenting his own account of the nature of arithmetic, Frege presents biting criticisms of a number of other accounts, and is particularly interested in undermining both empiricist (Millian) and what he takes to be overly “psychological” accounts of the subject. Frege’s own account of arithmetic turns on the idea that numbers are objects, and that their existence and fundamental properties are independent of our thoughts about them. They are, in that sense, objective: we do not create, but we discover, numbers and arithmetical truths. Frege also argues in Grundlagen that arithmetical facts are essentially facts about the sizes of collections: to say, for example, that 2 + 3 = 5 is to say something that logically entails various facts about the possibility of matching up unions of 2- and 3-membered collections with 5-membered collections. The reconciliation of these two apparently-conflicting claims, that is, that arithmetical truths are about objects (the numbers), and that they are equivalent to facts about arbitrary collections, is at the heart of Frege’s view of the nature of arithmetic and of arithmetical discourse. The first central point in this account is Frege’s view of what we mean when we say something like “There are four pens on the desk.” His view is that in a case like this, we have attributed a property (roughly, the property of having four things falling under it) to the concept pen on the desk. (A concept (Begriff ) here is not a mental entity, but is the kind of thing that a predicate stands for.) We have also, equivalently (in a way that needs explaining; see below) affirmed a relation between a particular object, the number four, and this concept (pen on the desk). As Frege puts it, “the content of a statement of number is an assertion about a concept.”4 The connection between the object four and the property of having four things falling under it turns critically on the kind of object that a number is, for Frege. To explain this, we need first to explain the notion of an extension. What we mean when we talk about extensions of concepts is explained via the following equivalence: to say “the extension of the concept F = the extension of the concept G” is to say something equivalent to: “Everything that falls under F falls under G, and vice-versa.” This equivalence, the principle of extensionality, underwrites Frege’s novel view that we can obtain knowledge of objects without the aid of intuition: if we have analytic knowledge of some claim of the form “∀x(Fx iff Gx),” then (because the principle of extensionality is itself analytic, as Frege sees it), we can conclude via purely analytic principles the corresponding statement: “the extension 3  Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner, 1884). English translation by J. L. Austin as The Foundations of Arithmetic, A logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). (Hereafter, Grundlagen.) 4  Grundlagen §55.

Frege (1848–1925)   213 of F = the extension of G.” To obtain the numbers themselves, we need the notion of a cardinality concept. A cardinality concept is a second-level concept (so, one under which concepts, rather than objects, fall), and it’s one under which a first-level concept falls if and only if that first-level concept has a specific number of objects falling under it. For example: the concept having exactly two objects falling under it, a concept under which fall all and only those first-level concepts under which fall exactly two objects, is a cardinality concept. Notice that for any first-level concept F, there is a cardinality-concept equinumerous with F, under which fall all and only those concepts equinumerous with F.  Finally:  numbers, for Frege, are the extensions of cardinality concepts. Specifically, where F is a first-level concept, the number of Fs is the extension of the cardinality concept equinumerous with F. The number zero is, as Frege understands it, the number of the concept not-self-identical. That is: it’s the extension of that second-level concept under which fall exactly those first-level concepts that are equinumerous with the concept not-self-identical. Since there are, as a matter of logic, no non-self-identical objects, a concept is equinumerous with the concept not-self-identical iff nothing falls under it. Consider now a statement of the form “There are zero Gs,” which Frege understands to mean “0 = the number of Gs.” Given Frege’s analysis of “0” and of “the number of Gs,” this statement means: “The extension of that concept under which fall all and only those concepts equinumerous with the concept not self-identical = the extension of that concept under which fall all and only those concepts equinumerous with the concept G.”

And this statement is straightforwardly equivalent (via the principle of extensionality) with the statement: “The concept not-self-identical is equinumerous with the concept G,”

which itself is logically equivalent with the statement: “∀x~Gx” It’s worth pausing to notice just how important this point is for Frege. On the analysis in question, a statement about a particular object, 0, and its relation to a concept G, is logically equivalent to a claim about how many things fall under G. This is exactly what Frege needs in order to reconcile his two fundamental views about cardinal numbers: namely, that a statement of number is a statement about the cardinality of a concept, and that a statement of number is a statement about a particular object, that number. At least, this is what he needs for this reconciliation in the case of the number zero. In order to carry out this analysis for the rest of the finite cardinal numbers, Frege needs to provide canonical concepts guaranteed (via principles of pure logic) to have exactly the right number of objects falling under them. This is done as follows: the number one is, as Frege understands it, the number that belongs to the concept identical with zero. The number two is the number that belongs to the concept identical with zero or identical with one. And so on. In this way, Frege demonstrates how we can so understand the numbers that they are individual objects, and objects whose relations with arbitrary concepts “encode,” as it were, facts about the cardinalities of those concepts.

214   Patricia A. Blanchette Having provided accounts of the individual numbers, Frege next sketches proofs, from (what he takes to be) purely logical principles, of a core of fundamental claims about number (essentially, variants of what we now know as the Dedekind-Peano axioms). The underlying idea was that from these fundamental claims we would be able in a routine way to prove the whole of the arithmetic of the finite cardinals, so that the proofs of these fundamental claims, once the details were filled in, would provide the decisive demonstration of the logicist thesis. Frege promises that the final demonstration will be provided in future work, work that will give the detailed and rigorous proofs of those fundamental arithmetical truths. The semantic theory found in Grundlagen is similar to that of Begriffsschrift: Frege does not yet have the distinction between sense and reference, but does clearly hold that the important properties and relations in which he’s interested—that is, truth, logical entailment, and relations inter-definable with these—apply in the first instance not to sentences, but to the contents thereof. One important thesis insisted upon in Grundlagen, and one that proves highly influential throughout the semantic tradition that follows Frege, is what has come to be called the context principle. The principle is the thesis that in order to understand what the meaning of a word is, we should not take the word in isolation, but should consider the contribution made by that word to the sentences in which it appears. Frege takes it that this thesis is especially important when we investigate the meanings of numerals. The idea is that instead of asking, in isolation, what the numeral “3” stands for, that is, what the number three is, we should ask how that numeral contributes to the meanings of whole sentences in which it occurs. As Frege sees it, the failure to appreciate this point has been responsible for the mistaken idea that numerals refer to ideas, or to mental constructions of some kind: when people have looked for an object that can be identified in isolation, the only candidates have seemed to be some such psychological objects. Frege’s view is that the mistake lies in the initial focus on a search for objects that are identifiable independently of context (e.g. specific ideas), rather than on an investigation into the contribution made by numerals to whole statements. Adherence to the context principle, says Frege, enables us to make sense of a kind of object that’s identifiable in a quite different way than are, say, the objects of the material world. As we might put it, the context principle is essential to Frege’s account of our apprehension of abstract objects. During the next decade, a good deal of Frege’s attention is presumably taken up with his monumental Grundgesetze der Arithmetik,5 whose first volume was published in 1893. This is the work in which Frege provides the remarkably rigorous proofs, promised in Grundlagen, of the fundamental truths about numbers. Prior to the publication of Grundgesetze, however, Frege writes and publishes three articles that have become enormously influential in the philosophy of language. These are “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (“On Sense and Reference”),6 “Funktion und Begriff,”7 and “Über Begriff und Gegenstand.”8 In these essays, Frege introduces 5  Grundgesetze der Arithmetik Band I (Jena: Hermann Pohle, 1893). Partial English translation by M. Furth as The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). (Hereafter: Grundgesetze I) 6  “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100, 25–50. Reprinted in I. Angelelli (ed.), Kleine Schriften (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990) (2nd edn.) (hereafter, KS), 143–62. English translation by M. Black as “On Sense and Meaning” in B. McGuinness (ed.), Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Blackwell Press, 1984) (hereafter, CP), 157–77. 7  Funktion und Begriff, (Jena: Hermann Pohle, 1891). Reprinted in KS 125–42. English translation as “Function and Concept” in CP 137–56. 8  “Über Begriff und Gegenstand,” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 16 (1892) 192–205. Reprinted in KS 167–78. English translation as “On Concept and Object” in CP 182–94.

Frege (1848–1925)   215 the distinction between sense and reference discussed earlier. Here we turn to some of the details of that mature semantic theory.

11.2.2  The 1891/92 Essays Frege says very little about why, in the course of working out the very demanding proofs that were to establish his logicist thesis, he pauses to develop an account of the nature of language. Part of the explanation would seem, however, to be as follows. Frege’s view of arithmetic is that it is an objective science, in the sense that its truths hold independently of human activities. On this view, the fact that 13 is prime, for example, is in no way dependent on any ideas that anyone has ever had about 13; this thought would have been true whether anyone had ever entertained it or not. This means that the objects that arithmetic deals with, principally including the numbers, cannot be, and cannot be in any way, dependent on ideas or other human productions. Consider now the question of what we’re trying to prove when we prove that: (D)  2 + 2 = 4. It would seem quite evident that what we’re trying to do here is quite different from what we’re trying to do when we attempt to prove that: (E) 4 = 4. This fact, that to prove (D) is not the same thing as to prove (E), might be taken to provide an argument against Frege’s objectivist conception of arithmetic. The argument is as follows: If arithmetic is about independently-existing objects, then, because the object 2+2 is the same as the object 4, (D) says exactly what (E) says, and hence a proof of (D) can be given just by proving the trivial (E). But this is absurd. So arithmetic is not about independently-existing objects.

The lesson to be drawn from the difference between (D) and (E), according to this line of thought, would be that (D) is about something like a “way of constructing” a number, or a pair of “ideas,” or some such thing. Because it’s plausible to claim that the idea or the “way of constructing” a number given by the phrase “2 + 2” is different from the idea or construction given by “4,” one can make sense, on this line of thought, of the clear difference between (D) and (E). For Frege, it is important to resist this line of argument, and to maintain that arithmetic is really about the independently-existing arithmetical objects, despite the difference between, for example, (D) and (E). His response is that the difference between (D) and (E) is a matter of a difference in the senses, that is, the thoughts expressed by those sentences, despite the fact that their singular terms, that is, “2 + 2” and “4” have the same reference. The resulting two-tiered theory thus straightforwardly allows Frege to hold both that (D) and (E) express different items of knowledge (one of them being trivial, the other not), and that the sentences, and the thoughts themselves, are true in virtue of purely objective facts about independently-existing objects.

216   Patricia A. Blanchette On the mature semantic theory as it’s developed in this period, the thought expressed by a sentence is also known as the sense of that sentence, and is determined entirely by the senses of the sentence-parts and their order of composition. Thoughts are, as already discussed, the primary bearers of truth and falsehood, and of the logical relations. They are also the things with which one must be appropriately related in order to be said to understand the sentences that express them. When one is engaged in lucid conversation with someone, one grasps the thoughts expressed by the sentences used by that other person. This is done largely in virtue of one’s understanding of the other person’s words, that is, in virtue of one’s grasp of the senses associated with those words. Thoughts are also, finally, the contents of belief, knowledge, and the other attitudes. To believe or to doubt something is to bear a particular relation to a specific thought. Thoughts therefore play a unifying role in the account of assertions, sentences, beliefs, and the truth-values thereof. The fact that one person can doubt just what another believes, and that this can be the content of another’s assertion or the claim expressed by a given sentence, is explained by Frege in terms of the fact that, in each case, the content in question is a thought. That these apparently-disparate entities—beliefs, assertions, sentences—can all be true or false is in turn explained by the fact that each is related in a straightforward way to a thought, and that this thought is, at bottom, the thing that is true or false. The reference of a singular term (roughly, a noun phrase—e.g. a definite description, name, or pronoun) is an object (a person, place, physical object, number, etc.). The sense of a singular term is again what that term contributes to the senses of the sentences in which it appears, and is also, typically, a way of presenting the reference of that term. The other parts of language, for example, predicate phrases, relation terms, and so on, also have senses and references, according to Frege. The reference of a one-place predicate (e.g. “. . . is blue”) is what Frege now calls a concept. Concepts as conceived in this later period are similar to the concepts of Grundlagen in their close relationship to predicates, but they are essentially richer in two ways: First, they are clearly now the references of predicative phrases, and hence are not the entities grasped in an act of understanding. Secondly, concepts in the mature period are importantly different from objects in that they are essentially predicative. To understand this notion, consider the difference between the sentence (A) in section 11.1.3 and the list of terms (AL) Alice, the property of liking geraniums While (A) expresses a thought, (AL) doesn’t; the series of terms in the latter doesn’t form the kind of unified whole sufficient for expressing a truth or falsehood. Frege’s account of the difference is that the concept-phrase “. . . likes geraniums” in (A), unlike the phrase “the property of liking geraniums” in (AL), refers to something essentially predicative: the concept referred to is of such a nature that to refer to it is to predicate. Another way Frege has of putting the point is the metaphorical one that concepts are “unsaturated” or “incomplete,” unlike objects, which are “saturated” or “complete.” To use a concept-phrase in a sentence is to predicate, because concepts are just the kinds of things reference to which amounts to predication. Concepts are, for Frege, a particular kind of function. Functions are unsaturated, that is, again, essentially predicative. Any part of a sentence that doesn’t refer to an object refers to a function. For example, in the sentence “2 + 2 = 4,” the part “. . . + . . .,” that is, the plus-sign accompanied by two gaps, refers to a function. Specifically, it is the function that takes as arguments pairs of numbers, and returns as value the sum of those numbers. Similarly,

Frege (1848–1925)   217 “the paternal grandfather of . . .” takes as argument a person, and returns as value the father of the father of that person. A concept (e.g. that referred to by “. . . likes geraniums” or “. . . is blue”) also gives values for arguments: in this case, the arguments are objects of appropriate kinds (something that does or doesn’t like geraniums, something that is or isn’t blue), while the value is what Frege calls a truth-value, that is, the value true or the value false. Concepts, in short, are one-place functions from objects to truth-values.9 In a complex term, like “Alice’s paternal grandfather,” the reference of the whole term is determined in the obvious way by function–argument application: the function referred to by “. . .’s paternal grandfather,” when applied to Alice, gives as value the person Robert (i.e. Alice’s paternal grandfather). Hence the reference of “Alice’s paternal grandfather” is simply the person Robert. (Notice that though we can now conclude that the two phrases “Alice’s paternal grandfather” and “Robert” have the same reference, they do not of course have the same sense.) Similarly, the reference of “the positive square root of nine” is the result of applying the function referred to by “the positive square root of . . .” to the argument nine, to yield three. Frege’s view is that the truth-value of a sentence is determined in just the same way as is the reference of a complex singular term, via the application of function to argument. The truth-value of (A) is determined by applying the function referred to by “. . . likes geraniums” to the argument Alice, to deliver the value true. Because of the obvious parallels here, Frege uses the word “reference” to include not just the object referred to by a singular term and the function referred to by a function-expression, but also the truth-value of a sentence. Sentences, in short, are said to refer to truth-values. Finally, function-expressions, including concept-expressions, have a sense as well as a reference. The senses are, predictably, simply the contributions made by those expressions to the thoughts expressed by the sentences that embed them. The phrases “. . . is a prime number between 12 and 16” and “. . . is a positive square root of 169,” though they refer to concepts that deliver the same value for every argument, nevertheless have different senses. This follows from the fact that a person might, for example, know that “There is exactly one positive square root of 169” is true while doubting whether “There is exactly one prime number between 12 and 16” is true. To sum up Frege’s views about the senses and references of different parts of language: the reference of a sentence is a truth-value, while its sense is a thought. The reference of a singular term is an object, while its sense is the contribution made by that term to the thoughts expressed by sentences in which that term occurs. This sense is often usefully thought of as a “mode of presentation” of the object referred to. The reference of a function-expression is a function, an essentially predicative entity. The sense of such an expression is, again, just what that expression contributes to the thoughts expressed by sentences in which it appears. There are also, as Frege sees it, terms that, though in some sense meaningful, lack reference. The phrase “the greatest prime number” is one such. Though the phrase clearly lacks a reference (since there’s no greatest prime), it is also not a nonsense phrase. We can, for example, prove rigorously that there is no greatest prime number, which we couldn’t do if the phrase in question were nonsense. Frege’s description of this situation is that the

9  This is somewhat over-simple. For Frege also acknowledges higher-level concepts; these are functions not from objects to truth-values, but from functions to truth-values.

218   Patricia A. Blanchette phrase “the greatest prime number” has a sense but no reference. Because the reference of a sentence is determined by function–argument application in the way described here, no sentence involving this term can have a reference either. That is to say, sentences like “The greatest prime number is even,” on Frege’s view, have no truth-value. They do, however, have a sense. The essays published in 1891/92 also develop the application of the theory of sense and reference to various natural-language phenomena. The fundamental idea that the reference of a sentence is determined by the references of its parts, for example, is seen to face a potential difficulty when applied to sentences involving constructions like “Aristotle believed that . . .,” “Jürgen said that . . .,” and so forth. The difficulty is as follows: the ellipsis in these examples is typically filled by a complete sentence, resulting in a complex sentence like: (S)  Aristotle believed that humans are rational. That embedded sentence (“humans are rational”) would normally, on Frege’s view, have a truth-value as its reference—in this case, the value true. But now something has gone wrong, since the truth-value of (S) is not determined just by the reference of “Aristotle believed that . . .” and the value true. We can see this by noticing that the sentence (S*)  Aristotle believed that the earth orbits the sun has parts with the same ordinary references as do the parts of (S), but has a different truth-value. In short, the truth-value of the whole sentence, in the case of (S) and (S*), is not determined by what one would ordinarily take to be the references of its parts. Frege’s response to this difficulty is to say that in contexts involving the relation “. . . believed that . . .,” the sentence embedded to the right of that phrase has as its reference not its ordinary reference (i.e. its truth-value), but its ordinary sense (i.e. a thought). The sentence (S) is true iff Aristotle bears the relation of belief to the thought ordinarily expressed by “humans are mortal,” and accordingly, the phrase “humans are mortal,” in this context, refers to that thought. Similarly, in appropriate contexts, an embedded sentence might refer to itself (e.g. in quotation-mark contexts). In such cases, the embedded sentences have what Frege calls their “indirect” reference. The difficulty sketched here is thus averted, with the result that, uniformly, the reference of a sentence is determined by the references of its parts.

11.2.3  Mature Logicism: The Grundgesetze In 1893, Frege publishes the first volume of his magnum opus, the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Much of what became the second volume was presumably completed by this time as well, though the second volume was not published until 190310. In Grundgesetze, Frege provides the rigorous development of arithmetic whose groundwork was laid in the Begriffsschrift of 1879 and the Grundlagen of 1884. Specifically, Grundgesetze introduces a formal system of logic very like that of Begriffsschrift, and demonstrates (i) how to analyze fundamental concepts and truths of arithmetic in terms of surprisingly-simple constituent 10 

Grundgesetze der Arithmetik Band II (Jena: Hermann Pohle, 1893).

Frege (1848–1925)   219 concepts, and (ii) how to prove, with exacting rigor, the thus-analyzed arithmetical truths from (what he took to be) purely-logical principles, using purely-logical methods of inference. The analyses and proofs themselves exhibit an extraordinary degree of precision and rigor, reflecting Frege’s view that for his purposes, it is not enough that each step in a proof be obviously correct; it is required that the most fundamental principles on which each step is based be made evident to anyone who works step-by-step through the proofs. The proofs are, in this sense, a monument to analytic care and precision. Frege took himself to have completed that part of the project that deals with the natural numbers (i.e. the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on). That is to say, he provides here the promised purely-logical proofs of highly-analyzed versions of a handful of fundamental truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. The idea, once again, was that these truths would in turn suffice for the proof of the whole of the arithmetic of the natural numbers. The completed part of the Grundgesetze project also includes the beginnings of a theory of real numbers. A critical part of the formal system of Grundgesetze is its inclusion of a term-forming operator which, when attached to a predicate-phrase, gives a name of the value-range (Wertverlauf) of the associated function. Value-ranges are the modernized, formalized version of the extensions of Grundlagen, and obey a similar extensionality principle. Specifically, the principle is that for functions F and G, the value-range of F = the value-range of G iff (∀x)(Fx = Gx). Where F and G are concepts (first-level functions of one argument whose value is always a truth-value), the identity-conditions of the associated value-ranges are exactly those of the earlier extensions. Value-ranges play in Grundgesetze a role similar to the central role played by extensions in Grundlagen: numbers are now, in Grundgesetze, understood as value-ranges of concepts, and the extensionality-principle governing these items (Basic Law V) is essential to the most-important results regarding numbers. Frege’s work on the project was stopped short by the letter from Bertrand Russell in 1902 noted in section 11.1.1, in which Russell points out the inconsistency in Frege’s system.11 The inconsistency arises as follows. Consider the predicate R, a predicate satisfied by exactly those objects o such that: o is the value-range of some concept C such that ~C(o). Now we consider the value-range of R, which we’ll call “r.” We ask whether that object r falls under the concept R, that is, whether R(r). If R(r), then (given the definition of R) r is the value-range of some concept under which it, r, does not fall. From this it follows (given extensionality) that r does not fall under any concept of which it is a value-range. But this contradicts our supposition that R(r), since r is of course the value-range of R. Thus far, we have shown that ~R(r). But this too leads to contradiction: if ~R(r), then r is the value-range of a concept (namely, R) under which it does not fall. So, by definition, R(r). At this point, we have deduced both that R(r), and that ~R(r), which is a contradiction. Since we did this using just Frege’s fundamental principles about value-ranges, we see that something is very badly wrong with those principles. The problem this raises for Frege’s logicist project is twofold. First of all, it means that the purportedly-logical axioms on which Frege meant to found arithmetic are not in fact truths of logic. That this is a serious difficulty follows from the fact that there is no 11 

Russell to Frege June 16, 1902. English translation in Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, Gabriel et al. (eds.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) (hereafter, PMC) 130–31.

220   Patricia A. Blanchette straightforward way to replace the problematic parts of the system by principles that are both purely logical and strong enough to develop arithmetic as Frege understands arithmetic. The second difficulty raised by the contradiction stems from the fact that Frege’s all-important analyses of arithmetical truths turn crucially on the notion of value-ranges, that notion that is shown by Russell’s contradiction to be incoherent. Both the analytic stage and the proof-theoretic stage of Frege’s logicism are therefore undermined by the difficulty over value-ranges. Frege’s immediate reaction to the paradox was to attempt to modify his principles regarding value-ranges so as to maintain the general structure of his proofs while regaining consistency.12 He eventually came to realize, however, that no such “fix” would work, and that no principles governing value-ranges could count both as ‘purely logical’ by his own lights, and sufficiently rich to ground the existence of an infinite collection of objects, that is, the numbers. His conclusion was that the paradox, and the consequent failure of his fundamental principles, shows that there is no way to give a purely-logical grounding of arithmetic. This pessimistic conclusion was not universally shared in the light of Russell’s paradox. In section 11.3.1, we outline the central ways in which logicist programs are still being pursued, ways which share a good deal with Frege’s original program, but depart from it in some significant ways. Frege’s own conclusion was that the combination he had envisioned, a conception of arithmetic in which arithmetic is about distinctive objects and yet grounded in pure logic, is untenable. Judging by some late manuscript notes, he appears to have held at the end of his life that the most promising account of arithmetic would maintain the view of arithmetic as concerned with distinctive objects, but would ground the truths about those objects in facts given by pure intuition.13

11.2.4  Later Work Outside of Grundgesetze To return to Frege’s chronology: in the final few years of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, the mathematical world in Germany and much of Europe saw an explosion of interest in logic, and in the nature of mathematical theories. An important part of this development involved increasing sophistication regarding the nature of axioms, and in the understanding of the nature of, and of proof-techniques regarding, the relations of dependence and independence that obtain between parts of theories. In 1900, David Hilbert published a monograph entitled Foundations of Geometry, in which the newly-emerging techniques for demonstrating consistency- and independence-results, and the new, modern conception of axioms, are presented.14 In the years 1899–1900, Frege

12 

See the Appendix to Grundgesetze I. See “Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung der Arithmetik,” dated by the editors at 1924/25, in Hermes et al. (eds.), Nachgelassene Schriften (2nd revised edition) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), 298–302. English translation in Hermes et al. (eds.), Posthumous Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) (hereafter, PW), 278–81. 14  David Hilbert, Grundlagen der Geometrie (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1900). English translation of the 10th edition: Foundations of Geometry, L. Unger (trans.), P. Bernays (ed.) (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1971). 13 

Frege (1848–1925)   221 engaged in a correspondence with Hilbert, in which Frege presents an opposing view of the nature of axioms, and of the fundamental logical relations of consistency and independence.15 Frege continues to develop his position in two series of essays, each entitled “On the Foundations of Geometry,” published in 1903 and 1906.16 At the heart of Frege’s argumentative strategy is a defense of his view that mathematical theories, and hence their axioms, must be understood as collections of thoughts. This view is in direct conflict with the view defended by Hilbert, in accordance with which the axioms of a theory ought to be understood essentially as partially-interpreted sentences. On Frege’s view, each mathematical theory is a set of truths about a determinate subject-matter, while on Hilbert’s view, a theory is a set of general structural requirements, applicable to a wide variety of different domains. Hilbert’s conception of theories is geared towards the investigation of the structural properties of those various domains, and of demonstrating such results as the consistency and independence of sets of axioms, the categoricity of defining conditions, and so on. Frege’s conception, on the other hand, is geared toward the investigation of the fundamental truths of a given subject-matter, as these concern a specific collection of objects, functions, and relations. In the debate between the two logicians, and in Frege’s follow-up essays, we find a rich articulation of a fundamental cleavage between two ways of conceiving of the nature of logic and of its role in mathematics. The issue remains alive today, with both Frege’s and Hilbert’s sides defended in various ways as part of ongoing investigations into the nature of mathematical and logical knowledge. In the years 1918–25, Frege returns to the philosophy of language, writing a series of essays on sense and reference that expand upon the conception of language articulated in the period 1891–2.17 In these later years, he treats, for example, the problem of “indexicals,” that is, words like “I” and “yesterday” whose reference depends in part on the context in which they are used. Frege’s fundamental idea here is that the context of use is part of what determines the sense expressed by the use of a sentence, so that, for example, two utterances of “It’s raining today” will express different senses if they occur on different days. Frege also pursues in more detail than previously the nature of thoughts (i.e. as sketched already, the senses of sentences). As against the worry that thoughts are somehow too ephemeral to be real, Frege replies that thoughts are indeed real, and that (in keeping with his general anti-psychologism) they are to be distinguished from anything subjective, like ideas. Thoughts exist in what he calls in 1918 a “third realm,” a realm of objects that differ from material objects in not being concrete, but that differ from ideas in not being subjective.18 15 

Letters between Frege and Hilbert 1895–1903. English translation in PMC 32–52. “Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie,” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 12, 1903, 319–24, 368–75. Reprinted in KS 262–72. English translation as “Foundations of Geometry: First Series” in CP 272–84. “Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie,” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 15, 1906, 293–309, 377–403, 423–30. Reprinted in KS 281–323. English translation as “Foundations of Geometry: Second Series” in CP 293–340. 17  “Der Gedanke,” Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I, 1918, 58–77, reprinted in KS 342–61; English translation in CP 351–72. (Hereafter, “Der Gedanke.”) “Die Verneinung,” Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I, 1918, 143–57, reprinted in KS 362–77; English translation in CP 372–89. “Gedankengefüge,” Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus III, 1923, 36–51, reprinted in KS 378–94; English translation in CP 378–94. 18  “Der Gedanke” 69 (KS 353; CP 363). 16 

222   Patricia A. Blanchette Frege died in Bad Kleinen in 1925, and is buried in the Friedhof at Wismar, the city of his birth. Though he judged his logicist project to have been a failure, he seems to have recognized nevertheless the importance of his logical investigations. Six months before his death, Frege expressed to his son Alfred, regarding a number of unpublished essays, a sentiment that applies as well to the published work: Even if not all is gold, there is gold in them. I believe there are things here which will one day be prized much more highly than they are now.19

11.3  Aftermath: Frege’s Legacy 11.3.1  Logic and Mathematics Frege’s idea that logic can be pursued via the use of formal systems is so commonplace now as to be worth hardly a second thought, but it was an entirely new idea at the time, one that Frege introduced and pressed into extraordinarily fruitful service. Though our means of employing formal systems now incorporates some elements that Frege would have rejected, as he explains in his controversy with Hilbert, nevertheless the fundamental idea of encoding logical inferences via syntactic transformations remains at the heart of modern logic. Frege’s introduction of the quantifier, similarly, brought logic into the modern era.20 His analyses of fundamental arithmetical concepts in terms of simpler logical ones came out of fruitful interaction with the mathematics of his day and cannot in all respects claim originality, but Frege’s single-minded and rigorous employment of those analyses in pursuit of an epistemologically-significant goal has left a permanent mark on the philosophy of mathematics. The logicist project itself, despite its clear failure (indeed, to some extent because of that failure) has been an especially fruitful influence on subsequent investigations. The central reason for continued interest in Frege’s logicism stems from a continued interest in the nature of mathematical, specifically arithmetical, truth. In providing his analyses of arithmetical truths, Frege argues for a number of theses about arithmetic, including the claims that arithmetic is not based on anything psychological, that it is not grounded in intuition, and that arithmetic deals with a specifically arithmetical collection of objects, the numbers. The arguments Frege provides for these theses continue to play a significant role in the development of competing philosophical views about the nature of mathematical truth and mathematical knowledge. Because Frege’s views taken together require the truth of logicism (though not the success of his particular means of demonstrating it), any real engagement with Frege’s important arguments about the nature of mathematical truth and knowledge must come to grips with his logicism. Progress on these issues requires

19  Letter to Alfred Frege of July 26, 1925, quoted by Hermes, Kambartel and Kaulbach in their historical introduction to Frege (PW ix). 20  That is not to say that here Frege was alone: the quantifier was also introduced at roughly the same time, though independently, by Giuseppe Peano and by C. S. Peirce.

Frege (1848–1925)   223 progress on the question of whether the logicism is, in the end, a viable thesis, and if not, then which parts of Frege’s edifice one must give up. Bertrand Russell himself did not take the paradox he discovered in Frege’s system to be a reason to reject the logicist thesis. After the paradox, he pursues together with Alfred North Whitehead a revised version of logicism that is intended to be essentially in the spirit of Frege’s project.21 One difficulty with the Russell–Whitehead project, and a difficulty that would presumably have led Frege to view it as not quite “logicist,” is that the fundamental principles, the axioms, from which Russell and Whitehead attempt to derive much of mathematics include principles (especially the axiom of infinity and the axiom of reducibility) that Frege would not have regarded as purely logical. The difficulty here is that they lack the kind of self-evidence that Frege demanded of fundamental logical truths. On this question, subsequent scholars have primarily sided with Frege. More problematic for the Russell–Whitehead version of logicism, together with that of Frege, are Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.22 These theorems were proven after Frege’s death, so did not directly affect Frege’s own research, but provide yet another blow to the kind of program envisioned both by Frege himself and by those, e.g. Russell and Whitehead, who worked on resuscitating a Frege-style logicist project in the aftermath of Russell’s paradox. Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem shows that, as long as the truths of arithmetic are expressible, as both Frege and Russell would have agreed, via a syntactically complete set of sentences of a formal language of arithmetic, then there is no way to axiomatize arithmetic. That is to say, Frege’s assumption that there is a manageable “core” of arithmetical truths from which the rest of arithmetic is provable is simply false. No decidable set, and certainly no finite set, of truths can serve as the proof-theoretic basis for all of arithmetic. This result by itself does not show that logicism is false, but it does undermine the straightforward Fregean way of attempting to demonstrate its truth, namely the strategy of proving the (purported) core arithmetical truths from truths of logic. In addition, it means that logicism can be true only if the truths of logic themselves form a quite unmanageable collection (specifically, one that’s not recursively enumerable). The concept of value-range at the core of Frege’s difficulties with logicism is one of a handful of similarly compelling, and similarly problematic, concepts that have been at the heart of much mathematical work since the middle of the nineteenth century. The notions of the graph of a function, and more familiarly of a set of numbers or of functions, are of the same ilk as Frege’s value-ranges, and are similarly slippery: their role is sufficiently ubiquitous and foundational that it appears that, as Frege puts it, we “cannot get on without them.”23 But the attempt to lay down basic principles governing these entities has revealed that the most natural way of understanding them, that is, Frege’s way, in terms of a purportedly-analytic principle of extensionality, is not workable. It is in this sense that Frege’s clarity about the importance of value-ranges, and the precision of his attempt to 21  Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–13). 22  Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I” (“On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I”) in Feferman et al. (eds.), Kurt Gödel Collected Works Volume I (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1986), 144–95. 23  Grundgesetze I, x (Furth 6).

224   Patricia A. Blanchette lay down their fundamental principles, has been salutary for the development of modern foundational theories and for an understanding of their philosophical significance. Current foundational work, following the lead of Cantor and Zermelo, focuses on the axiomatic presentation of theories of sets, dropping Frege’s claim to the analyticity of those axioms. The philosophical question of what such foundational strategies can tell us about the nature of mathematical truth, of mathematical objects, and of mathematical knowledge is one that continues to be a subject of fruitful debate, and one that turns in part on the question of which of Frege’s aims, in attempting to found arithmetic on value-ranges, must be given up in the modern setting. Finally:  an especially important thread in the influence of Frege’s logicism concerns the impact of that thesis on modern empiricism. Here the influence is twofold. First of all, Frege’s logicist notion of the reduction of truths about a given subject-matter to truths about something arguably more simple serves as a model for later attempts to reduce the empirical sciences to something closely linked to the immediate contents of experience. In this regard, Frege’s influence on both Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap is direct, and through them the Fregean conception of theoretical reduction, or descendants of it, continues to influence empiricists and their critics today. The second central influence of Frege’s logicism on this movement was that the logicist thesis offered hope to early twentieth-century empiricists that mathematical knowledge might be subsumed under the umbrella of logic, and hence no longer stand as a prima facie obstacle to the empiricists’ denial of synthetic a priori knowledge. In this, the tradition that follows Frege goes further than Frege would have gone himself: Frege is no empiricist, and holds that geometry (unlike arithmetic) offers a clear instance of the synthetic a priori. Though Frege’s own attempt to demonstrate the truth of his logicist thesis was, as discussed, a clear failure, the question of whether that logicist thesis, or some near relative of it, is in fact defensible remains open.24

11.3.2  Language and Mind Frege’s theory of sense and reference has had an enormous impact on twentieth- and early twenty-first-century philosophy of language and mind. Most significant here have been his views that each significant piece of language has a sense that’s grasped by competent speakers, and that it is in virtue of expressing this sense that a piece of language refers to the item that it in fact refers to. Put together, these two views about sense give rise to a thesis about the connection between mental states and language that Frege himself did not dwell on: the thesis that what our words refer to is determined by what we, the speakers of those words, understand, or represent, when we use them. So stated, the thesis is not entirely clear, depending as it does on exactly what one means by “understand” or “represent,” and also on what it is for such a represented entity to determine the reference of a word. While different accounts of exactly what Frege has in mind when he speaks of “grasping” the sense of a sentence will yield different verdicts on the degree to which Frege

24  See, for example, Crispin Wright, Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects (Aberdeen University Press, 1983) for a defense of what has come to be known as the “neo-Fregean” approach to logicism.

Frege (1848–1925)   225 can be said to explicitly agree with different variations of the theme here, the fundamental idea is relatively straightforward: the Fregean view, not unreasonably so-called, is the view that our terms refer to entities in virtue of those entities’ satisfaction of properties that we speakers explicitly associate with those words. The view, thus vaguely stated, has a natural appeal, and might seem to be simply part of the obvious view that language is conventional: our words refer to what we take them to refer to, and our thoughts are about various things in virtue of our ability to, as Russell puts it, “describe” those things. A good deal of modern philosophy of mind and of language revolves around the question of whether, and if so in what sense, this basic idea can be right. The central line of argument against the Fregean view turns on the claim that reference is not determined exclusively by what’s explicitly represented by competent speakers, but is determined (in part) by other, non-represented relationships between speakers and those references. With respect to proper names, for example, it has been argued that speakers can refer via the use of names without knowing uniquely-identifying qualities of the names’ bearers; what’s required instead is intentional participation in a community-wide practice, one whose details need not be represented.25 A  similar argument applies to natural-kind terms like “water” and “gold”; here the idea is that successful reference does not require explicit representation of features of the kinds in question, but something more like an appropriate spatial or causal relationship to instances of the kind.26 With respect to indexical terms like “I” and “yesterday,” it has been argued that the explicitly-represented information is insufficient to determine reference, and that non-represented features of the speaker’s context play an essential role in the determination of reference.27 In all of these cases, the argument against the central Fregean thesis is that if the sense of a singular term is just what the competent speaker understands, then sense is insufficient to determine reference. Similar reasons have prompted some to disagree with Frege’s idea that there are two kinds of semantic value for each piece of language. Here the argument has been most pronounced with respect to proper names: the claim is that proper names have only a single semantic role, which is to refer to their bearers. Other features of names, it is argued, for example, the collection of things that the user knows about the bearer, are taken on this view to form merely collateral information, and not to serve as part of the semantics of the name. Definite descriptions, on the other hand, have on this line of argument just the relevant descriptive properties as semantic value, while the reference is merely collateral.28 Arguments in favor of something like the Fregean position turn on the kinds of considerations originally raised by Frege himself. That proper names have senses is argued for by noting that two co-referring proper names can play different semantic roles, as can be seen by the possibility of turning an informative statement into a tautology by substituting an instance of a proper name for an instance of a co-referring one. That sense (or: something 25  See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980 (hereafter, Kripke). 26  See Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of Meaning,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 (1975), 131–93; also Kripke. 27  See John Perry, “Frege on Demonstratives,” Philosophical Review 86 (4) (1977), 474–97 and John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Nous 13 (1979), 3–21. 28  See Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (56) (1905), 479–93.

226   Patricia A. Blanchette explicitly represented by competent speakers) determines reference is argued for by noting, for example, that contextual features and the speaker’s relationship to them are part of what is, in the relevant cases, explicitly represented by speakers.29 And so on. Current debates regarding the role of descriptive mental representation in successful reference, and the necessity of a two-tiered semantic theory, go well beyond Frege’s own relatively rudimentary views about mental content and semantics. But the power of those original views is still felt in these debates, with Frege’s central questions still very much alive, and his fundamental ideas about language and thought forming an important theoretical stronghold.

Bibliography Main Works by Frege Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Halle:  Louis Nebert Verlag, 1879. English translation by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg as Begriffsschrift, A Formula Language, Modeled Upon That of Arithmetic, for Pure Thought in van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, 5–82. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl, Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner Verlag, 1884. English translation by J. L. Austin as The Foundations of Arithmetic. A Logico Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik Band I, II Jena: Hermann Pohle 1893, 1903. Partial English translation by M. Furth as The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Complete English translation by P. Ebert and M. Rossberg as Gottlob Frege: Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Main Collections of Frege’s Work and Correspondence (German) [1964] Begriffsschrift und andere Aufsätze, Ignacio Angelelli (ed.), Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. [1983] Nachgelassene Schriften (2nd revised edition), H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach (eds.), Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. [1976] Gottlob Frege: Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, C. Thiel, and A Veraart (eds.), Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. [1990] Kleine Schriften (2nd edition), I. Angelelli (ed.), Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.

Main Collections of Frege’s Work and Correspondence (English) [1952] Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Peter Geach and Max Black (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell Press; 3rd edition 1980.

29  See John Searle, Intentionality, an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Frege (1848–1925)   227 [1979] Posthumous Writings, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F. Kaulbach (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translation of most of Frege [1983].) [1980] Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, C. Thiel, and A. Veraart (eds.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translation of most of Frege [1976].) [1984] Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, B. McGuinness (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. (Translation of most of Frege [1990].) [1997] The Frege Reader, Michael Beaney (ed.), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Some Recent Books on Frege Beaney, Michael and Erich Reck (eds.), Gottlob Frege—Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Blanchette, Patricia, Frege’s Conception of Logic, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Demopoulos, William (ed.), Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Dummett, Michael, Frege:  Philosophy of Language, Cambridge MA:  Harvard University Press, 1981 (2nd edn.). Dummett, Michael, The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy, Cambridge MA:  Harvard University Press, 1981. Dummett, Michael, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Gabriel, Gottfried and Uwe Dathe (eds.), Gottlob Frege. Werk und Wirkung, Paderborn: Mentis, 2000. Heck, Richard, Frege’s Theorem, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Heck, Richard, Reading Frege’s Grundgesetze, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kreiser, Lothar, Gottlob Frege: Leben, Werk, Zeit, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001. Potter, Michael and Tom Ricketts (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Frege, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Russell, Bertrand, “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (56) (1905), 479–93. Russell, Bertrand and Whitehead, Alfred North, Principia Mathematica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–13. Sluga, Hans, Gottlob Frege, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Press, 1980. Weiner, Joan, Frege in Perspective, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Wright, Crispin, Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects, Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1983.

PH I L O S OPH IC A L MOV E M E N T S

Chapter 12

Idea lism Terry Pinkard 12.1 Introduction When we look back at the big picture of nineteenth-century philosophy, its first part (at least on the continent) largely consisted in elaborating idealism, whereas in the second half of the nineteenth century the continent widely rejected idealism. As the continent discarded it, in British and American philosophy idealism found a new life. However, idealism’s role in nineteenth-century Anglophone philosophy ultimately simply set the stage for the dogged Anglophone rejection of idealism in the twentieth century. As a philosophical stance, idealism has an ancient provenance. In its most general form, the nature of idealism is easy enough to state: it generally amounts to the thesis that the empirical world is either not as real or is somehow deeply dependent on non-empirical structures or principles (“idealities”). One paradigmatic example of such idealism (to put it again in its most general form) would be something like a Pythagorean conception of the world in which numbers are real but the realities of the empirical world are at best manifestations of (or at least metaphysically dependent) on numbers and their relations. However, by the early modern period, “idealism” had come to mean something like the view that things are what they are only as they are experienced by or thought by some “ideal,” conscious thinker. Put even more economically: idealism came to be a thesis about the mind-dependence of the empirical, and perhaps even of the whole material world. Bishop Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived” neatly sums up the stance of modern idealism by the eighteenth century.

12.2  Kantian Transcendental Idealism However, once one ceases to fly at such a high altitude, it becomes much more difficult to state succinctly what “idealism” means. To get at what was at issue in the nineteenth century about “idealism,” one has to retreat a bit to the eighteenth century (or to what historians call the “long” nineteenth century, roughly the years between 1789 and 1918). In particular, on the continent, the interest in idealism focused on Kant’s description of his

232   Terry Pinkard own philosophy as “transcendental idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason, published in its first edition in 1781.1 In a story told now many times, Kant was incensed when one of the earliest reviews of the book accused him of being just another version of “Berkeleyan” idealism, that is, somebody who believed that the empirical world of things is in some appropriate way really just a set of subjective experiences or a construction put on subjective experience— that “to be was to be perceived.” Kant aggressively asserted that his system was no such thing. Kant had argued that the world of our experience was limited to the subjective conditions under which we could experience that world and that what things were like in themselves, apart from the conditions under which we could experience them, was in principle unknowable. Nonetheless, our experience was not itself without a metaphysical structure. There were certain conditions of our experience—such as, among others, causality as necessary succession in time and substantiality as the idea of independent things persisting over time—that were the metaphysical, non-empirical conditions of the things of experience as experienced. However, it was simply a false inference to conclude from “we must experience independent substances as causally related” to “things in themselves, apart from our experience of them, must be substances that are necessarily causally related.” One of the ways (but not the only way) we knew that this was a false inference was that if we actually detached ourselves from any possible experience and made claims about what things in themselves were like based on the way we had to experience them, we found ourselves necessarily involved in sets of antinomies, that is, contradictory assertions, each side of which had equally good evidence for themselves (such as “the world has a beginning in time” and “the world has no beginning in time”). Since the one thing we did know about the world in itself apart from the conditions under which we could experience it was that it was not self-contradictory, we therefore knew that our claims to know the metaphysical nature of things in themselves were not adequate. Nonetheless, we could still erect a thin metaphysics of experience—a metaphysics of the way the word necessarily had to appear to us—by looking at the conditions under which a human subject could become self-conscious only by bringing together within his self-consciousness the various “givens” of sensibility (including the spatio-temporal structures that Kant also claimed were valid only for our experience and not of things apart from the conditions under which we can experience them). Thus, what Kant called transcendent metaphysics—the great past dream of all philosophy to provide an account of the ultimate way things had to be—turned out to be unobtainable (which, as Kant repeatedly noted, did not mean that people would ever cease to want that kind of thing). Instead of “transcendent” metaphysics (the study of the necessary nature of things in themselves apart from—“transcendent” to—our experience), we had to settle for “transcendental” metaphysics (the way things necessarily had to take shape in our experience of the world). 1  Kant’s own statement in Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, p. 345 (A369): “By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves.”

Idealism   233 Kant also claimed to have saved the idea of human freedom by this gambit. On the one hand, if we think about the world in which we live, we note that everything in it is the result of some prior cause, that this necessarily forms a deterministic system, and therefore there can be no human freedom. Yet, from the practical point of view, we must take ourselves to be free when we deliberate about any action. From the first-person standpoint, we cannot see ourselves as just matter in motion, since making a decision to do something would then only amount to watching ourselves from the outside and then trying to predict what our neuromuscular system was going to do. It seems therefore that we must practically presuppose that we are free, but we must also rule out the very possibility of such freedom on theoretical grounds. Kant’s answer to this dilemma lay in his system of transcendental idealism. In transcendental idealism, we fully endorse the idea that there is no reason to think that in the world as we must experience it we could be free, but that itself is no reason to conclude yea or nay that in the world of things in themselves, we are not capable of exercising the kind of self-starting causality on which freedom seemed to depend, and since we had to practically suppose that we were free, we were thus authorized to think of ourselves as self-causing, that is, free. In short, if transcendental idealism is true, then nobody can prove in metaphysics or physics that you are free, but likewise nobody can prove in metaphysics or physics that you are not free. Since you must assume you are free, and metaphysical agnosticism about freedom is the only truthful attitude to take, the practical assurance of freedom is enough. Finally, Kant also argued that the nature of this freedom—theoretically incomprehensible but practically necessary—was such that all the laws of morality followed from it. You were indeed responsible for your life, and morality was not equivalent at all to any set of de facto, social rules that governed one’s (often stultifying, eighteenth century Prussian) community. Moreover, the morality that followed from human freedom had as its binding, logical principle the injunction to respect the “dignity” that all people equally possessed. Everybody, each of us, is of unconditional worth, and in Kant’s language, is an “end in itself.” Whereas in the social world of Kant’s time, the various “dignities” of nobles vis-àvis commoners put them on a higher social scale and therefore as having greater worth, in the moral world dignity was radically and totally equal and possessed a value beyond all price. Freedom and equality of dignity were the commitments of transcendental idealism. Kant famously remarked that “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”2 A  younger philosopher at the time, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, took this to heart and published a widely read piece that argued that, more or less, Kant had therefore resolved the dispute between religion and science. Science, by which he basically meant post-Newtonian physics, described a world of necessary connections among material things in which God seemed to have little room to breathe. Yet since the world of faith still called on those who believed that there was more to life than just matter in motion, Kant has proven, so Reinhold’s argument went, that the faithful need not fear (natural) science. Natural science is the perfect account of the world as we must necessarily experience it. However, that world as we necessarily experience it is decidedly not the world of things in themselves. If there is no rational ground for faith, there is nonetheless no rational ground for abandoning it. In fact, faith is just that: faith in a world beyond or

2 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 29 (Bxxx).

234   Terry Pinkard radically different from the world as we know it. The most rigorous hard-headed materialist thus had reason to believe that his own materialism was not an argument against faith even if it was just as well not an argument for it. Those of faith did not have to worry that their views might fly in the face of empirical reality as science accounted for it.

12.3  Idealism in Reaction to Kant Kant thus rapidly came to assume a commanding intellectual position in German thought. The great tensions of life in that period—the cult of “the heart” versus the cold machine state, the growing tension between science and religion, and the ossified feel of the public morals of social life versus the demands for more space for individual action— all seemed to find a possible resolution in the Kantian philosophy. During this period, universities were also beginning to rethink themselves and their mission. For many people, they seemed to be only medieval holdovers where tenured professors taught useless out of date orthodoxy to students who were mostly concerned with drinking themselves silly. To many therefore it seemed best to simply abolish such institutions. In light of this, universities began to rethink themselves, and one of the places where this rethinking was going on was in the tiny town of Jena in Saxony, where a benevolent if not really interested Duke was letting a famous poet-turned-government official build the skeleton for what would eventually become the modern collegiate research university.3 One of the things that made the university at Jena take off was that it rapidly became the center where Kant’s philosophy was being discussed and developed. It was also the place therefore where “philosophy” actually took over from theology, law, and medicine as the anchor and the heart of the enterprise. “Idealism” as “transcendental idealism” thereby rapidly assumed an importance it had not had before. “Idealism” in Kantian terms did not amount to the older thesis that only the ideal world (say, that of numbers) was real, nor did it hold that the world was a simple construct out of, or in some way reducible to, the experiences of a conscious subject. “Transcendental idealism” did insist that the world that science described was indeed the world described under the only conditions under which we could experience it and that the world science explained was in that qualified way mind-dependent and thus “ideal.” However, “transcendental idealism” was, as Kant insisted, also an empirical realism. The experienced world was not an illusion, hiding the real world behind itself. The experienced world was the real world, the world of things in themselves but only as they were experienced, even if that experience was not revelatory of what those things in themselves metaphysically, “ultimately” were. That world, or this world represented as existing apart from our experiential conditions, was in principle a mystery to us, and “transcendental idealism” thus retained an opening for faith and for radical human freedom. “Experience” turned out to have its own metaphysics, now taken as the non-empirical conditions of 3  See Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Pinkard, T. (2011), “The Social Conditions of Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), A. W. Wood and S. S. Hahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Idealism   235 the things that appeared in that experience, not as what those things were in themselves. The metaphysics of experience (the transcendental) did not extend to the metaphysics of things-in-themselves (the transcendent). Of course, not everybody jumped onboard. Although the idea was intriguing, many claimed to be deeply puzzled about exactly what the relation was between the experienced world and the world of unknowable things in themselves. Were they two different worlds, or were they one world represented in two different ways? Did it mean that “nature” as we know it was really something constructed by us? And what did it mean to say that our own “self-consciousness” was a condition of all other representations? Kant’s first Critique appeared in 1781, the second (altered) edition in 1787, and shortly thereafter, the French Revolution in 1789 shook Europe. Kant’s arguments for the abandonment of the dreams of traditional metaphysics, his defense of freedom as a kind of metaphysical causality, and the supposed a priori nature of the claim to equal dignity (all secured by “transcendental idealism”) looked like they might dovetail rather closely with the explosive fall of the ancient regime, the slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and the declaration of human rights. Indeed, they seemed close enough that a German living in France during the period commented in a journal at the time that “Calvin and Luther, Sieyès and Kant, a Frenchman and a German, reform the world.”4 In the public mind, “transcendental idealism” was assuming a rather exalted place alongside the Reformation and the Revolution itself. While this was going on, Kant himself began to see some cracks in the architecture. To bring the subject of freedom and morals genuinely into “transcendental idealism,” Kant realized that he had to provide some kind of account of how the transcendentally free will (practically presupposed as a metaphysical condition of our deliberations but theoretically indemonstrable as a feature of agents as things in themselves) actually produced humanly possible moral actions in the deterministic world of nature. Our unconditional moral ends had to be realizable in the natural world, and that meant that it cannot be the case that nature forbids such a realization. To that end, Kant held that we must also “postulate” (in a way we cannot theoretically demonstrate) such matters as an intelligible author of the universe who arranges things so that the nature–freedom dichotomy does not become grounds for despairing about the reality of freedom altogether. Likewise, Kant seemed to have had some second thoughts about his idea that one could derive all the moral duties from the very idea of freedom itself (at least in the way he had initially proposed), and in the Critique of Judgment of 1790, he claimed that in the experience of natural beauty, nature calls forth a spontaneous harmony within us between imagination and (discursive) intellect, such that nature seems to exhibit a purposiveness to itself without us being able to state that purpose. The world seems to be so ordered that we indeed have a rightful place in it, even though we cannot theoretically demonstrate such a claim, but we can nonetheless in the experience of natural beauty have a representation of such belonging. However, that threw lots of things into play, specifically, that of how the three Critiques (together with the other voluminous amount of material Kant generated between 1781 until

4  Quoted in Pöggeler, O. (1993), Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes. Freiburg: Karl Alber, p. 32.

236   Terry Pinkard his death in 1804) all fit together. Kant insisted that there had to be a unifying principle that held the whole enterprise together, but he did not spell one out.5 Given the immense social and cultural importance that his philosophy had assumed in the wake of the events of the time, it began to seem required by his immediate followers that the system of “transcendental idealism” be completed and that the “single principle” be found. It was no longer “just” an intellectual project. Much more seemed to hang in the balance. A good bit of the ferment in German philosophy from the late 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century had to do with the issue of how to come to terms with Kant and then how to come to terms with all the people who had tried to come to terms with Kant. One major stream of the reaction had to do with rejecting anything that explicitly labeled itself “idealism” and opting instead for something that preserved certain key elements of Kant’s philosophy while thoroughly rejecting the “idealism” part. Early Romanticism, particularly the strain invented in Jena around 1795, was a large part of that, and it too had its own long historical tail.6 For others, however, “idealism” remained a live option until the 1840s. Post-Kantian “idealism” was kept alive in part by the widespread belief that something crucial for life at large was at stake. Reinhold had already made self-consciousness into the key element of his own attempt at a unification of the Kantian program. For Reinhold, the key element in Kantianism was that of “representation” (Vorstellung), and, so Reinhold had argued, if we got clear on what it was to have a “representation,” we would also get clear on all the other elements of “transcendental idealism.” Unfortunately, Reinhold’s own proposal, articulated in a widely read book, quickly ran into difficulties. Reinhold held that since any system had to begin somewhere, the most plausible beginning was with the fact of consciousness itself, and his version of idealism rested on distinguishing among a representation, an object, and a subject that relates the representation to itself and to the object. In Reinhold’s version, idealism claims that it is the subject that distinguishes itself (the subject) from its representation and distinguishes the object from the representation and then relates all three to each other. Unfortunately, as it was quickly pointed in reviews of Reinhold’s work, that seemed to involve a regress, since it required another subject to relate the subject doing the relating, and it seemed to assume what it was supposed to be proving.7 In any event, Reinhold himself soon abandoned the idea, and left Jena for a position in the university at Kiel.

5 

See the discussion of this in Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Förster’s treatment compelled me to rethink some key parts of the narrative I gave of this development in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6  See the appreciative account and limited defense of Romanticism in Frank, M. (1997), “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; and in Larmore, C. E. (1996), The Romantic Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press. 7  See Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Franks disputes the idea that Reinhold’s solution involved a regress. This accusation is usually attributed to G. E. Schulze in his review of Reinhold’s work. The real problem, so Franks argues, is that Reinhold’s view failed to distinguish transcendental from empirical representation, and thus begged the question. The relation between Reinhold’s and Kant’s views is also discussed in Pinkard, T. P. (2002). German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Förster, E. (2012),

Idealism   237

12.4  Fichtean Idealism Reinhold’s successor at Jena, J. G. Fichte, brought the issue of idealism to a head. Ascending to the chair in philosophy in Jena in 1794, Fichte had already created a bit of a sensation when he had anonymously published A Critique of All Revelation—the anonymity was the result of a publishing accident—and people had at first thought it was in fact Kant himself who had written it, thus making Fichte into an exalted literary figure almost overnight. In his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre—which might be loosely translated as the “Science of Science”—Fichte promised to rebuild the Kantian system from the ground up on the basis of one principle and thus establish “transcendental idealism” as the great foundational project of modern life upon which so many members of the public had pinned their hopes. To everyone’s shock, however, Fichte began by rejecting the central Kantian doctrine of unknowable things in themselves. We can put Fichte’s point in very general terms in the following way. Kant had divided the human capacities for knowledge into a faculty of receptivity (which received its content from the world via sensibility) and a faculty of spontaneity (namely, the intellect, which produced concepts). Fichte reasoned that the idea of the thing-in-itself as a third something-or-other in addition to the faculties of spontaneity and receptivity (intellect and intuition) could only be a pipe-dream. The concepts of receptivity and that of a thing-in-itself (in Kant’s term, the “noumenon” as the concept of a thing in itself) are really the same thing. If there is no thing-in-itself, there is no receptivity. The two concepts are the same or are at least analytically related.8 Moreover, one should not conflate the receptivity of sensible intuition with its passivity. The active–passive distinction is not the same as the spontaneity–receptivity distinction, even though they are related. Fichte, a close reader of Kant, noted that Kant himself seemed to argue that in fact our spontaneity (our conceptual faculty) goes deeply into our receptivity such that receptivity can receive nothing that does not have something like a conceptual formation already in it, and the resistance to the Kantian system lay in the conflation of receptivity with passivity. It made good sense to see spontaneity as going deeply into receptivity, even though it made little sense to say that activity was passivity or vice versa. If the whole critical system was supposed to be reduced to one principle, as Kant himself had suggested, then one likely way to develop the idea of “transcendental idealism” was to look at the faculty of spontaneity as such a single first principle and to see if the requirement of receptivity could be generated out of it. But was it really the first principle? And why start there? Much of Fichte’s work focused on that question, and he was to continually revise it as the years went by. However, his view came down to the idea that since one had to begin somewhere, with a “fact” of some sort, one had to look for a very special fact. He found that in self-consciousness itself, which he simply identified as the “I.” We are aware of ourselves, Fichte argued, in an intellectual intuition. (This runs together several of Fichte’s different discussions of 1794 and 1797, something inexcusable for rigorous Fichte scholarship but The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 8  See Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 109 and note 10, p. 109.

238   Terry Pinkard necessary for an overview like this one.) Now Kant had explicitly denied that any such intellectual intuition for such finite knowers as ourselves was possible, since an intellectual intuition would be something like a faculty of spontaneity that in thinking of its object created that object. We can imagine such a faculty, Kant said, as lying perhaps in God’s nature, but that is impossible for the finite, discursive creatures we are. Fichte’s riposte was that the “I’s” consciousness of itself was exactly such an intellectual intuition. Until the “I” thinks of itself, it does not exist as a subject, that is, as an agent, even though the organism that will embody the “I” would exist. Moreover, the “I’s” awareness of itself cannot be that of a subject’s awareness of an object, even of a special object, since that would set in motion an infinite regress (there would have to be another “I” that was aware of the first “I”, or else the other self-consciousness would self-contradictorily have to be not selfconsciousness). Nor can the “I’s” awareness of itself be the result of a self-ascription, since the “I” would have to already be in place for such an ascription to be possible. Indeed, it looks as if self-consciousness (awareness of oneself as the subject of actions and conscious states) is not stateable in any propositional form at all. If nothing else, that itself shows that Reinhold’s proposal that “representation” serve as the key concept in “transcendental idealism” cannot be right. The founding principle is therefore itself a presuppositionless activity which can only be authenticated in the act of actually thinking of itself. Although the necessity of self-consciousness being inexpressible in normal terms may be demonstrated, the intellectual intuition of the “I” cannot. The “I” is what it is in thinking of itself as being a subject, an “I,” and one can grasp that “fact” only by performing the same intellectual intuition. To make his point more forcefully, Fichte revived an older German term, Tathandlung (literally: a deed-action) to indicate the kind of activity in question.9 It is an activity (spontaneity) that generates itself. In the Fichtean sense, I know myself most basically both non-observationally and non-inferentially (to use the formulation put to use in a different context by Elizabeth Anscombe).10 However, if the intellectual intuition of the “I” is to have any content, it must come from something other than its own spontaneous activity. Rather than beginning with a duality of sorts (between, say, concept and object as Frege and others were later to argue), Fichte maintained that full systematicity required us to begin with a single principle, the “deed-action” and see how that presuppositionless activity required of itself that it be related to something other than itself.11 How the “I” is supposed to generate the “not-I” from out of itself was a matter to which Fichte devoted much effort and for which he made a number of revisions in the Wissenschaftslehre as he worked his views out. The basic idea, however, remained Kantian in spirit:  Concepts without intuitions are empty, and 9 

Anglophone scholars on the whole have taken Fichte to have invented the word, Tathandlung, for his own purposes to distinguish it from a normal fact, a Tatsache. Paul Franks shows that Tathandlung is in fact an older word, and it is Tatsache that was relatively new at Fichte’s time. See Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. The mistake Franks locates is, alas, repeated in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10  Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958), Intention. Oxford: Blackwell. 11  On the idea of an ultimate duality of starting points, see Rosenberg, J. F. (1993), “Raiders of the Lost Distinction: Richard Rorty and the Search for the Last Dichotomy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53(1), pp. 195–214.

Idealism   239 intuitions without concepts are blind. Put into the Kantian-Fichtean idiom, that would mean that self-consciousness (as a deed-action, a Tathandlung) is empty unless it brings in its train the element of receptivity. The reality of the “I” established in intellectual intuition requires it to think of itself as determined by a “not-I.” This was not taken to be merely a statement of common sense by Fichte, as if he rhetorically asked himself whether there was a world independent of human thought. It was supposed to follow from the intellectual intuition of the “I” (an activity of thought that creates its object) that self-consciousness requires consciousness of something independent of itself if it is to make true judgments about anything. The “I” is thus said to “posit” itself; it authorizes itself to make judgments, which take their authority from what is not the “I.” The authority of a perceptual judgment that states a true fact, for example, comes from the independent object being perceived. However, that means in effect that the “I” authorizes the object to exercise an authority that is not dependent on the “I’s” authorizing it. This contradiction and the demand to resolve the contradiction, for Fichte, clearly forms the basis for the further development of the Wissenschaftslehre, which proceeds as an infinite task of the “I” authorizing itself to authorize states of affairs other than itself to authorize judgments about themselves, and in doing so, continually reaffirming its, the subject’s, basis as the sole source of authority. For Fichte, the underlying dynamic of the Wissenschaftslehre was the tension produced by the competing claims that the “Not-I” had to lie outside of the limits of the intellectually intuited “I” and at the same time had to lie within those limits, since receptivity lies within spontaneity. It was this “inside–outside” tension which formed the basic contradiction whose resolution remained an “infinite task.” The series of steps in this new form of “transcendental idealism” thus form a kind of double series, in which the “real” impacts on the ideal (with the idea of the object causing our perception of it) and in which the “ideal” grounds the real (as a “posit” of the “I”). In this way, Fichte took himself to have corrected the original Kantian version to make “transcendental idealism” more streamlined and systematic. Objects do indeed cause our perceptions of them (in the real series), but their authority as truth-makers of perceptual judgment comes from us (in the ideal series). Moreover, the ideal (as expressed at first in the principle of self-consciousness) becomes progressively more determinate as it is embodied in various ways in the real (for example, in sensibility). This takes on, moreover, a new shape when the subject encounters not an object but another subject (another “Not-I” but who is also an “I”), who is not merely determined as such-and-such (as are objects) but determines himself and the original subject. Put into less rigorous terminology than Fichte himself insisted upon: The ideal (the set of principles and norms necessary for self-consciousness) is progressively realized in practice as the subject confronts a recalcitrant natural world and the irreducible reality of other self-conscious agents and then reshapes his principles accordingly. We are constrained to think of objects in a certain way by the development of the “ideal–real” series, and we are constrained to think of other agents as possessing a freedom and an intrinsic dignity by virtue of the standing they have to demand recognition of their freedom and dignity. Fichte’s philosophy remains an idealism because its various foundational principles are determined as those which are required for there to be self-consciousness in the first place. However, it sees the transcendental principles as being derived from the way more abstract and simple principles are worked out in their embodiments in reality (in sensibility and in practice) and not from the table of judgments (as Kant had done). (Fichte’s own system and

240   Terry Pinkard jargon about the “I” and the “Not-I” also immediately called forth its own satires, which always started with the idea that somehow Fichte had concluded that the pure “I” was he, Fichte, who had posited the entire world.12) Whereas when Kant had said that “the synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy,” he almost certainly did not intend it to be taken that this implied that if we investigated the conditions under which an agent could become self-conscious, we would have solved all the traditional issues in metaphysics, Fichte took it that way.13 Since Fichte claimed the title “transcendental idealism” for his philosophy while rejecting the doctrine of unknowable things in themselves, that suggested to any number of people in his own time and in our own that he therefore had to mean that the world of objects in space and time (the world simpliciter, as we might think) was somehow only something “posited” by the I, or that Fichte’s idealism was only some other version of phenomenalism, namely, that the world, or objects in it, are only constructions justified by their success in explaining our subjective experience. That was never Fichte’s point or aim, even if it is true that Fichte’s real aim remains difficult to express.

12.5  Schellingian Idealism Reinhold had moved on from Jena in part because of the obvious failure of key elements of his program. Fichte left Jena not because of any intellectual failure but because of personal failures to respond to spurious trumped-up charges of atheism brought by his opponents. Fichte’s own successor at Jena in 1798 was F. W. J. Schelling, all of 23 years old at the time, the boy wonder of German philosophy. Whereas Fichte was constantly reworking his views to get it exactly right, Schelling changed his views sometimes in matters of months, and over the course of his career took up several different positions. Any statement about Schelling’s idealism thus is a statement about a particular time-slice of Schelling’s philosophical career. The time-slices in question here are Schelling’s views circa 1795–1803. Early on, Schelling became a Fichtean but also became quickly dissatisfied with Fichte’s approach, which he thought was too “subjective.” Fichte had been misled, Schelling thought, by thinking there were only two alternatives before him: idealism or dogmatism. In Fichte’s terms, the dogmatist thinks that a subject (or “agent” as we tend to call them nowadays) is simply one more natural thing among others, and that there is nothing ideal 12  As Heine summed up that reaction: “The ladies asked: Doesn’t he even believe in the existence of his wife? No? And Madame Fichte puts up with this?” (Heine, H., T. P. Pinkard, et al. (2007), On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) 13  The cite comes from the second (1787) edition of Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan: “The principle of apperception is the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge.” (§16), and in the footnote to that, “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy. Indeed this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself.”

Idealism   241 (or “normative”) about her. For the dogmatist, the difference between subjects and objects is only a difference between kinds of objects. However, the idealist thinks that subjects occupy a special status and are ideal in their nature. Subjects are more like statuses in a normative space than they are like objects in space and time, but they are not merely statuses. (Embodied agents are also indeed objects in time and space, but that is another matter.) Subjects are also entities that exist in their own intellectual intuition of themselves, and they possess certain powers on their own (in specific, the powers of authorization). Now, even Fichte himself thought that neither dogmatism nor idealism can be demonstrated to be superior to the other without begging all the basic questions. Thus, for Fichte, everything is either an object or a subject, and your metaphysics depends on which side you choose on the basis of your character. However, so Schelling suggested, what if there was a third alternative? Perhaps not everything is either a subject or an object—perhaps there is something that is neither subject nor object, and perhaps subjects and objects are both manifestations or appearances or modes of that third thing. Entertaining this possibility was reinforced by two factors in the intellectual climate of the 1780s and 1790s. First, the figure of Spinoza had been reinserted into German philosophy in the 1780s by F.  H. Jacobi; even though Jacobi’s own concern with Spinoza by and large had to do with his worries about the direction of the Enlightenment.14 The Spinozistic idea—that the world was one substance that manifested itself in two different ways (mental and physical)—was growing in appeal to those people, themselves growing in number, who were dissatisfied with the ossified bureaucratic structure of German churches and were increasingly filled with a yearning for a more spiritual connection with nature. Second, and more importantly, Kant himself rather tantalizingly suggested something that itself suggested a Spinozistic reading of Kantianism itself. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant said that in the experiential judgment of natural beauty we have before us the “indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of appearances,” which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.”15 Now, Kant almost certainly did not mean that this substance might be the one substance of which Spinoza spoke, since that would be making a statement about things-in-themselves which Kant’s own “transcendental idealism” ruled out. Nonetheless, it suggested to Schelling that something indeed very much like Spinoza’s substance, modified in light of Kant and Fichte’s views, might very well be that which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.” This suggested that one might retool Spinoza’s monism (his idea that there was only one substance with different attributes) to see if it could be

14 

The story of this debate may be found in various forms. See Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press; Beiser, F. C. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. For the earlier reception of Spinoza’s work, see Israel, J. I. (2001), Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 15  Kant, I. and W. S. Pluhar (1987), Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., §§57, 59.

242   Terry Pinkard modified so that it might plausibly serve as something that could be deemed to be a substrate for freedom and nature. This was given a further impetus by Schelling’s idea that Kant had not satisfactorily resolved the opposition between (deterministic) nature and freedom in his ethics. If we are to achieve the “highest good” (as Kant calls it) as the union of virtue and happiness, then it must be the case that the makeup of the empirical world is such that happiness and virtue really can coincide, and Kant held that this compels us to postulate an “author” of the world who arranges things this way. Since Fichte had, for Schelling, already shown that we do have knowledge of the thing-in-itself when it comes to the intellectual intuition of the “I,” Kant’s own solution—that of a mere “postulate” of the purposiveness of the world—seemed unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, Fichte’s solution appeared too subjective (too much focused on everything as a “posit” made by the “I”) and not exhaustive of all the alternatives. Finally, as Schelling began to work out his own ideas for how to bring Fichte’s idealism into line with Spinoza’s monism, he became more and more convinced that Fichte’s own rather subjective idealism required being put into the context of a more thoroughgoing naturalism of a very specific sort.16 However, for that to work, we needed a conception of nature that was expansive enough both to serve as the nature that the natural sciences were exploring with more and more success—the tempo of natural scientific investigation was beginning to pick up markedly during this period—and still have a place for free agency within itself. This came to be Schelling’s own idealist naturalism, and it led directly to the creation of his Naturphilosophie. The term itself, Naturphilosophie, is best left in its original spelling. It does not mean a “philosophy of nature” but is supposed instead to single out a new way of doing philosophy—a “nature philosophy,” as it were, with intellectual intuition at its core and which understood itself to be an “absolute” idealism. In its initial formulation by Schelling, it was supposed to be the “absolute” idealist counterpart to the more relative “transcendental idealism.”17 As Schelling developed the idea of a Naturphilosophie, he also began an intensive study of the natural sciences. Two things struck him. First, there were vast gaps in the sciences with regard to their domains. Schelling had already accepted Kant’s view that there was a vast gap between the kinds of judgments made in mechanics (Newtonian physics) and those made about organisms. The latter were teleological in that identifying anything as an organ at all (an eye, a liver, etc.) involved understanding it in terms of its purposes (i.e. in terms of the functions it fulfilled). As Schelling looked over the landscape of the natural sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, it seemed that there were great leaps between various domains. From the model of billiard balls colliding in mechanics, there did not seem to be any way to get to magnetism and electricity, nor from there to

16  See the account in Kosch, M. (2006), Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 17  “The whole from which the Naturphilosophie issues is absolute idealism. The Naturphilosophie does not take precedence over idealism, nor is it in any way opposed to it so far as it is absolute, but certainly is opposed, so far as it is relative idealism, and accordingly grasps only the one side of the absolute act of cognition, which, without the other, is unthinkable.” (Schelling, F. W. J. v. (1988), Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1797). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.)

Idealism   243 the elective affinities of chemistry and from there to the sciences of life in all its forms. That suggested that there might be something like deeper metaphysical forces binding the different regions together that were not susceptible to empirical investigation. (Here his inspiration was no doubt Kant’s own idea that empirical physics presupposed more basic forces of attraction and repulsion.) Second, Schelling’s emerging Platonism played a key role. These metaphysical forces could be conceived as idealities, analogous to Plato’s forms, and it would be the interaction of these metaphysical idealities with each other that generates the natural world as we find it in experience and scientific study. That would effectively transform Spinoza’s conception of the one substance (as the “one and all,” the shorthand by which German philosophers of the time referred to it) into a kind of spiritual entity and would transform the Spinozistic idea that nature is God into, more or less, the idea that God is nature. The cosmos as a whole is fundamentally an ideal, spiritual entity that embodies itself in matter, which it itself generates out of its own ideal structure. (This is Schelling’s transformation of Spinoza’s idea of nature as naturata and naturans, as product and activity of producing.) This effectively transformed Fichte’s conception of the series of the ideal becoming entangled in the real into a much less subjective conception. Schelling’s architecture for the way in which the ideal embodies itself in the real is that of showing how certain idealities (which initially appear as forces of a sort) push themselves into a balance (what he called an “indifference point”) that then results in a new ideality which in turn divides itself anew.18 The impetus for the push to new idealities comes from the way in which the “indifference point” fails (as a finite result) to reestablish the original (“infinite”) identity. The world begins in a form of identity (or, to put it slightly anachronistically, as an identity of energy and matter), and out of the simple forces of combustion (“heat” and “light”), matter emerges in its initial states, and with that, a dynamic process is set into motion. This dynamic pushes onward to magnetism (with its positive and negative poles), electricity (with positive and negative electricity) and on to chemical combinations and finally on to life itself (which divides itself into sexual difference). Life itself then pushes on to the formation of self-conscious creatures, who are the point in this evolution of the cosmos at which nature turns around and reflects on itself. The “absolute” is the point at which the original identity (as it were, of energy and matter) fully reestablishes itself. This final indifference point would be God (or more generally, “the divine”) thinking about its own creation. Not for nothing did Schelling refer to this as his “identity” philosophy.19 Almost all of the details of this developmental process are by now of concern mostly only to intellectual historians, even though in their own day they exercised a good deal of influence on some scientists. (It has even been argued that Schelling’s views were

18  Here is Schelling’s own summary of the process: “If the secret of nature consists in the fact that she maintains opposed forces in equilibrium or in lasting, forever undecided, strife, then the same forces, as soon as one of them acquires a lasting pre-dominance, must destroy what they were maintaining in the previous state.” (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1797), p. 57). 19  For what it is worth, this modifies the presentation of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie given in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

244   Terry Pinkard influential in setting the stage for Darwin’s conception of evolution.20) Schelling’s overall view is a fusion of Fichte, Plato, and Spinoza. The “absolute” posits itself in an intellectual intuition of itself, and what it intuits is itself as having generated itself out of these processes and their indifference points. Moreover, the “absolute” can intuit itself only if the process produces self-conscious creatures who intellectually intuit themselves and thereby establish their own existence as selves. Whereas Fichte thought that each individual agent intellectually intuited himself, Schelling thinks that each individual agent’s intellectual intuition of himself can itself only be a fragment of the “absolute’s” self-intuition. How exactly that is supposed to go has never been entirely clear, except perhaps to Schelling. In any event, what is clear is that this self-intuition of the “absolute” in and through human reflective activity cannot be a discursive matter. The scope for discursive thought rests on the capacity for individual intellectual intuition of oneself, which cannot itself be put into discursive form. (It at least cannot be demonstrated from any more fundamental proposition.) What one ultimately is intuiting in intellectually intuiting oneself is oneself as a fragment of the absolute’s self-intuition, and since this is a matter of the “infinite” limiting itself—of the cosmos as an original, boundless identity of energy and matter breaking itself up into energy and discrete bits of matter—one is intuiting the “infinite” making itself “finite” and then seeking to reestablish its infinity. The intuition of this is a form of philosophy—Naturphilosophie, to be exact—and is not itself an empirical science, even though it is supposed to have consequences for empirical science (such as “when investigating nature, look for symmetrical oppositions between positive and negative, polarized and unpolarized, etc.”). The same process can be recast for Fichtean “transcendental idealism”: one can begin with the idea of human experience itself, seek its conditions, arrive at an intellectual intuition of oneself (as Fichte had supposedly shown), and intellectually intuit that one’s own status as a “self,” a self-conscious agent, is itself a fragment of the “absolute.”21 As he worked that out, Schelling also came to assert that art, not philosophy, was the vehicle for expressing such an intellectual intuition in sensuously embodied human consciousness. Needless to say, there were very opposing views of how successful Schelling’s program was. For many it attracted a great deal of interest, and it spawned several generations of people who sought to construct their own Naturphilosophie, since—no surprise here— different people claimed to be intellectually intuiting different things at different times.22 20  See Richards, R. J. (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 21  This project is carried out in Schelling, F. W. J. v. and P. L. Heath (1978), System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 22  Hegel complained later in his lectures on the history of philosophy about Schelling’s procedure: “Wird aber mit der intellektuellen Anschauung angefangen, so ist das Assertion, Orakel, das man sich gefallen lassen soll, weil die Forderung gemacht ist, daß man intellektuell anschaue.” (English: : “If one begins with intellectual intuition, then all one has is assertion, the oracle in which one is supposed to acquiesce, since the demand is made that one intuit intellectually.”) (Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 435.) In his Encyclopedia, he complained without naming Schelling that: “Wenn es dem Bewußtsein nicht saurer gemacht würde, die Wahrheit zu erkennen, sondern man sich nur auf den Dreifuß zu setzen und Orakel zu sprechen brauchte, so wäre freilich die Arbeit des Denkens gespart.” (English: “When knowing the truth is not supposed to be so hard for consciousness – but rather one only needs to sit in one’s armchair and speak oracularly – then one is of course spared the labor of

Idealism   245 Some scientists of the first order were even inspired by it. Other scientists were completely baffled by the whole project and by Schelling’s execution of it. Other scientists still simply ignored it. By around 1809, Schelling himself seems to have abandoned the program and moved on to other equally ambitious (or some would say grandiose) projects, none of which he published in his lifetime. Schelling constructed several different systems of philosophy and gave lectures on them, only to find himself dissatisfied with each of them and then moving on to work on newer things. His literary executors published his various systems in his collected works after his death. Schelling never really stopped experimenting with his philosophy.

12.6  Hegelian Idealism Schelling’s fame in German philosophical circles was soon eclipsed by the rise of his friend from the days at Tübingen, Hegel. In perhaps the most famous university friendship of all time, Hegel, Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin had lived together as students in the Seminary at Tübingen and had worked intensely on issues in philosophy, poetry, politics, and religion. Schelling’s rise to fame in Jena put him in the position of being able to extend to Hegel an offer to join him in Jena and to co-edit a journal together which was to spearhead the new Schellingian direction in philosophy. After leaving Tübingen, Hegel had exercised a great sympathy for Kantianism, which was further honed in Switzerland where he worked unhappily as a private tutor. After his departure from Switzerland, Hegel went to Frankfurt where he was once again in the company of Hölderlin. The two worked together on Fichte’s system and on ideas about how to go beyond Fichte; although by the time Hegel arrived in Jena as a Schellingian, he had already by 1803 or 1804 moved away from Schelling’s position. (Schelling had left Jena in 1803.) After the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, it was apparent to just about everybody (and especially to Schelling) that Hegel was now a Hegelian and not a Schellingian. The preface to that work had even sarcastically referred (although not by name) to Schelling’s philosophy of the “absolute” as the “night in which all cows are black.” Schelling himself was offended by the reference. Ever since that point, one of the most basic questions about Hegel’s own idealism has been how Schellingian it really was.23 In his later lectures on the history of philosophy in Berlin in the 1820s, Hegel notes that although Schelling’s system of this period runs on two tracks—one starting with nature and ending up with self-consciousness and the intellectual intuition of the “absolute,” the other starting with self-conscious subjects and ending up with nature and the intellectual intuition of the “absolute”—what Schelling lacked was any logic for this enterprise.24 thinking.”) (Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 18.) 23  For a more detailed story of Hegel’s development, see Pinkard, T. P. (2000), Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 24  “Es sind im allgemeinen diese beiden Gänge sehr bestimmt ausgedrückt. Eine Seite ist dabei diese Durchführung der Natur zum Subjekt, die andere die des Ichs zum Objekt. Die wahre Durchführung aber könnte nur auf logische Weise geschehen; denn diese enthält den reinen Gedanken. Aber die logische Betrachtung ist das, wozu Schelling in seiner Darstellung, Entwicklung

246   Terry Pinkard Like Schelling, Hegel too saw his philosophy as an articulation of the “absolute.” However, unlike Schelling (at least after 1804), Hegel rejected all reference to intellectual intuition. The development, he argues, must come from “the concept,” and the unity to which this aspires, he says, is that of the “absolute Idea.” Some of the earliest reviews of Hegel’s works and some of the latest work on him nowadays basically take the line that Hegel simply took over the monistic Schellingian system, added a “logic” of sorts to it, and made it his own.25 On that view, both Hegel and Schelling are spiritual-Spinozists with the major difference between the two being that whereas Schelling was content to show how the original unities of the “one and all” were disrupted and come to temporary rest in the developing “indifference points,” Hegel thought he had nicht gekommen ist. Der wahrhafte Beweis, daß diese Identität das Wahrhafte ist, könnte vielmehr nur so geführt werden, daß jedes für sich untersucht wird in seinen logischen Bestimmungen, d. h. in seinen wesentlichen Bestimmungen; woran sich sodann ergeben müßte, daß das Subjektive dies ist, sich zu verwandeln in Objektives, und das Objektive dies ist, nicht so zu bleiben, sondern sich subjektiv zu machen. Man müßte am Endlichen selbst aufzeigen, daß es den Widerspruch in sich enthielte und sich zum Unendlichen machte; so hätten wir also die Einheit des Endlichen und Unendlichen.” (English: “One side [of Schelling’s views] develops nature all the way up to the subject, and the other develops the “I” all the way up to the object. However, [Schelling’s program] could really only be carried out in a logical manner, for the latter contains pure thoughts; it is the logical approach that Schelling never achieves in the exposition of his views and in his own development. The genuine demonstration that this identity is the genuine identity would rather have to be carried out such that each side would be investigated with regard to its logical determinations. It would then have to turn out that the subjective is what transforms itself into the objective, and that the objective does not remain objective but makes itself into the subjective. One has to show that the finite itself contains the contradiction within itself and makes itself into the infinite. In that way, we would have the unity of the finite and the infinite.”) (Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp., p. 435.) 25  See Beiser, F. C. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Beiser, F. C. (2005), Hegel. New York and London: Routledge. Beiser says that: 

There is not a single Hegelian theme that cannot be traced back to his predecessors in Jena, to many earlier thinkers whom Hegel and the Hegelian school either belittled or ignored . . . [Hegel] was a tortoise among hares; and, when all the hares had squandered or consumed their energies, he alone trudged, slowly but surely, over the finish line. Like all victors, he then rewrote history from his point of view, as the tale of his own triumph. (Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 9–10).

Beiser also claims that the Naturphilosophie “is the rational core rather than the mystical shell of Schelling’s and Hegel’s absolute idealism.” (Beiser, German Idealism, p. 509.) How close Hegel’s philosophy was to Schelling’s was, not surprisingly, the subject of great debate in Hegel’s own day. The early reviews of the Phenomenology contended with each other on whether Hegel had made a break with Schelling or was continuing on the same path. Beiser seems to take up the view voiced by J. F. Fries at the time that Hegel’s system is only “Schelling’s Naturphilosophie carried out on the side of spirit.” (Nicolin, G. (1970), Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen. Hamburg: F. Meiner, #132, p. 87.) Beiser’s view also echoes Schelling’s repeated complaints later in his life to anyone who would listen that Hegel had only stolen his ideas, and that Hegel’s system differed from his own only in the way one might transpose a violin concerto for the piano. See the discussion of the reception of the Phenomenology in Hegel’s own time in Pinkard, T. P. (2000), Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 256–65.

Idealism   247 shown how the later structures emerge out of a logic of sorts involving “negative” relations among the different articulations of the “absolute.” That certainly downplays Hegel’s own distinction of his system from that of Schelling, and it downplays Schelling’s own views on the differences. But what is the difference? In his day, Schelling was known as the “German Plato.” After K. F. Bachmann’s review of Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1810, Hegel became known as the “German Aristotle.” As Schelling intimated in his lectures in Berlin in 1841 (where he was criticizing Hegel), both he and Hegel had understood themselves to be completing the project that Kant had begun. How much of a Schellingian Hegel remained remains perhaps the most contentious issue in contemporary Hegel scholarship.26 (The likely runner-up is the status of Hegel’s putative Christianity. Resolving either of those problems here is both impossible and out of place.) It is clear, however, that both Schelling and Hegel, following Fichte’s lead, rejected the hard and fast Kantian dualism of concepts and intuitions, while nonetheless maintaining the validity of the distinction between them.27 Both of them rejected the Kantian doctrine of things in themselves for many of the same reasons that Fichte did.28 One of the clues that Hegel’s own conception of idealism differs from more ordinary conceptions of idealism is that one of his favorite metaphors (which he was fond of repeating) has to do with how animals are idealists and not realists.29 They do not take food to be appearances 26  For an informed and subtle defense of the idea that Hegel remained a Schellingian, see Bowman, B. (2013), Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 27  See Pippin, R. B. (2005), “Concept and Intuition: On Distinguishability and Separability,” Hegel-Studien 40. In that essay, Pippin argues that those who think that Hegel failed to distinguish concepts from intuitions simply have not read the texts carefully enough and have failed to make the distinction between “separability” and “distinction.” Concepts and intuitions are distinct for Hegel, but they are not separable. This also forms one of the core arguments of Pippin, R. B. (1989), Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The distinction between concept and intuition and their non-separability is also the focus of Sedgwick, S. S. (2012), Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 28  In his letter to Hegel about the Phenomenology in 1807, Schelling himself noted that concept and intuition were both just aspects of “what you and I have called the Idea—which by its very nature is concept in one of its aspects and intuition in another.” (Hegel, G. W. F. and J. Hoffmeister (1961), Briefe von und an Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, I, #107; Hegel, G. W. F. and C. Butler, et al. (1984), Hegel: The Letters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 80.) Hegel could have accepted that formulation, but he did not understand the unity of concept and intuition in the same way as Schelling did. 29  Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §246. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. London and New York: Allen & Unwin and Humanities Press, p. 9: “There is a metaphysics which is all the rage in our time, which holds that we cannot know things because they are completely closed off to us. One could put it this way: Not even the animals are as stupid as these metaphysicians, for they go directly to the things, seize them, grasp them and consume them.” See also Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §44. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 76: “The free will is consequently the idealism which does not consider things as they are to be existing in and for themselves, whereas realism declares those things to be absolute, even if they are found only in the form of finitude. Even the animal does not subscribe to this realist philosophy, for it consumes things and thereby proves that they are not absolutely self-sufficient.” See Hegel, G. W. F. (2010), Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard (p. 109): “Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in

248   Terry Pinkard of any underlying reality. They take it to be nutrition, and they are right. Now, on its face such a passage makes it hard to attribute any traditional idealism to Hegel’s thought. If anything, it sounds as if it might at best be a version of Fichte’s idealism, that there is a crucial element to a subject’s (and even an organism’s) “taking” something to be something or another. Put back into the Kantian-Fichtean terms from which Hegel’s idealism derives, the agent’s spontaneity includes within itself receptivity to the world. Rather than seeing concept and intuition as lying outside each other, as one version of Kantian orthodoxy would have it, receptivity lies within spontaneity. Although this might sound as if it were stating that our mental capacities (spontaneity, as it were) create the objects of perception (receptivity, as it were), such a view would conflate the active–passive distinction with the spontaneity–receptivity distinction, which Hegel does not do. Animals are idealists not because they actively constitute the objects of their world. Rather, to use a different metaphor, things “show up” in an animal’s sensory field as food because of the purposes the animal brings to bear on itself and its environment. Lettuce is not food for rabbits because rabbits create lettuce. Rather, lettuce shows up for rabbits as food because of the kind of creatures rabbits are, just as rabbits show up as food for foxes because of the kinds of creatures foxes are.30 The purposiveness of agents, since it involves self-consciousness, is even more complex. If one conflates spontaneity with activity and receptivity with passivity, then one is pushed to a view of the mind as “actively” imposing something like a “conceptual scheme” on more or less neutral content, and then one has the problem, itself generated by that very picture, of whether the things of experience are different from things in themselves. If one does not make that conflation, that problem does not automatically appear. On the Hegelian (and Fichtean) picture, things in the world show up in our experience depending on the spontaneity at work in that experience. Food can show up to an animal but not to a boulder. Likewise, animals can experience illness, a way in which their proper functioning is thwarted, whereas non-purposive entities, like a rock, cannot.31 Only for creatures with the proper nervous systems can things “show up” as food, and only for self-conscious creatures can things “show up” in experience as states, constitutions, divinities, artworks, and ethical requirements.32 Crucially for Hegel, this is not because the “I” does anything like such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.” 30  This language of “showing up” in experience was suggested to me by Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla. See also Kukla, R. and M. N. Lance (2009), “Yo!” and “Lo!”: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. 31  Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §371. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. London and New York: Allen & Unwin and Humanities Press, p. 429: 

The stone cannot become diseased, because it comes to an end in the negative of itself, is chemically dissolved, does not endure in its form, and is not the negative of itself which expands over its opposite (as in illness and self-feeling). Desire, the feeling of lack, is also, to itself, the negative. Desire relates itself to itself as the negative—it is itself and is, to itself, that which is lacking. 32  This is one way of taking Robert Pippin’s gloss on Hegel’s claim that “self-consciousness is desire itself,” namely, as a way of having certain things show up in experience (Pippin, R. B. (2010), Hegel

Idealism   249 “positing” these kinds of things. That individualistic language leads directly to images of imposing form on matter or conceptual meaning on distinct and neutral sensible content. Instead, the very elements of conscious experience—of singular things, of singular things as possessing general properties, or of things with properties exerting force on other things—themselves are realized (or, to use a different word for the same thing, actualized) only in self-conscious experience. Singular things show up in patterns of unseen forces and powers for a creature who has the conceptual capacity to render judgments on those things—judgments which, for example, can be true or false—and that capacity is that of self-consciousness itself: knowing where one stands in a larger space of reasons (to use not Hegel’s but Wilfrid Sellars’s terms), knowing the matters to which one is obliged, what is required, and to what one is pledged. That is Hegel’s idealism, and it is far more Kantian and Fichtean than it is Schellingian. The world “shows up” for creatures with a capacity for self-consciousness in a way that it cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. This is “idealism,” since it holds that there is nothing that is not available to conceptual thought—but not that conceptual thought imposes itself on anything. Since receptivity to the world is “within” spontaneity (the conceptual) such that the world can show up in determinate ways to self-conscious creatures, there is nothing “outside” spontaneity, and this means that spontaneity is boundless, unendlich (or “infinite” as it is usually translated). Put in this way, it is not the idea that the world is inherently spiritual but that there is nothing in principle in the world that cannot show up for conceptual thought. Even things that cannot be directly experienced, such as the infinitely small and the infinitely large can show up for conceptual thought when and only when the appropriate conceptual apparatus has been constructed (such as the differential and integral calculus). Hegel’s idealism is therefore not Schelling’s metaphysical idealism. It is indeed a metaphysics but one of a very different sort.33

on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press). 33  In a most unfortunate turn of phrase, Klaus Hartmann once called his interpretation of Hegel a “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel (Hartmann, K. (1972), “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, A. MacIntyre. New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday). This has led some to challenge not only Hartmann’s view but a series of other interpretations as “non-metaphysical” interpretations of Hegel. Their retort to the non-metaphysical reading is to point out that Hegel not only says he has a metaphysics, he actually has a metaphysics. (This is usually taken to underwrite the Schellingian interpretation of Hegel.) Hartmann’s view was much more limited. In saying that Hegel was “non-metaphysical,” Hartmann only meant that Hegel was not a metaphysician in Martin Heidegger’s sense. Heidegger accused the philosophical tradition of being metaphysical in that it took the question of the meaning of Being to be equivalent to the question, “Of all beings, which being is the most real?” For Heidegger, Hegel’s particular spin on this has to be that “spirit” is the most real of all Beings. Hartmann’s “non-metaphysical” reading was simply a rejection of that Heideggerian interpretation. Ignoring the rather obvious Heideggerian context, others have taken Hartmann to be arguing instead for some kind of version of Hegel as doing something like the analysis of language that was a bit of a fashion in the 1970s in Anglophone philosophy, but that simply was never Hartmann’s point. In the wider, non-Heideggerian sense of “metaphysics,” of course Hegel had a metaphysics. The issue of “metaphysical” versus “non-metaphysical” interpretations is thus a red herring. For an interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics inspired by Hartmann’s anti-Heideggerian reading, see Brinkmann, K. E. (2010), Idealism Without Limits: Hegel and the Problem of Objectivity. New York: Springer.

250   Terry Pinkard Hegel’s indebtedness to both Fichte and Schelling shows up in the way he would treat the series that goes from the ideal to the real. For Fichte, that involved the way in which the “I” posited the “Not-I” and the transformations in the “I’s” idealities as they became progressively embodied in the “Not-I.” In turn, that involved bringing the “Not-I,” taken as lying outside of the conceptual sphere, into the conceptual sphere, and for Schelling, it involved seeing the “I” and “Not-I” as already contained within the boundlessness of the “absolute.” Hegel argued for a third alternative. The effort to grasp singular items of consciousness—by pointing to things that are here and now—reveals that the attempt to carry out that kind of grasping activity cannot make itself real—cannot in Hegel’s terms, “actualize” itself—without pushing itself further to note that it is pointing out particular things as exemplifying general properties. However, that stance itself cannot actualize itself, become a real pointing out, without noting how those things fit into a larger context (of forces, of interactions, of regularities, etc.). In turn, that larger context itself only shows up to self-conscious agents already moving about in a more abstract space of reasons. This is a transformation, in effect, of Kant’s point that our intellects require both concepts and intuitions for singular things to show up in our experience as having general features. For Kant, this is the argument for the rules for what Kant calls a “universal self-­ consciousness.”34 Hegel took Kant to have moved a few steps too fast to reach that conclusion, and the difference of his idealism from that of Kant and Fichte depended in large part on that criticism. A self-conscious agent claims a certain authority for her judgments, an authority, among other things, to judge that this is how things look and this is how things really are. However, self-conscious agents confronting each other may challenge each other in ways the world does not. From the practical point of view, the individual things of the world can serve as means for the satisfaction of desires—as food in the most obvious case. Those things may resist being so taken—the deer may do its best to run away, and other animals may fight back—but being outside the space of reasons, they cannot challenge the agent’s authority to take them to serve neatly as means of nutrition. On the other hand, other self-conscious agents can indeed raise those kinds of rational challenges—they can not only fight back, they can dispute, for example, whether they should be taken as means, as servants or slaves, to the other’s desires. If we imagine such a confrontation in the distant pre-historical past, we see that such agents can be confronted with what could most abstractly be called, in the language of Hegelian idealism, that of coming up with a finite solution to an infinite problem. The space of reasons is boundless, but where agents are disputing about who really has authority over whom, they must appeal to that space of reasons, and as finite agents, they must appeal to competing views of what actualizing those reasons means. Where each is willing to stake his life on demanding that his own claim to authority be decisive, there is a fight to the death over who is to wield that authority. Had finite agents world enough and time, they could reason this out. However, finite agents need a finite answer to what otherwise could well take an infinite time. Sometime back in pre-history, one of them, as it were, opted for life when challenged to a 34  Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, B133: “As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. From this original combination many consequences follow.”

Idealism   251 “life or death” confrontation—he or she submitted to the other who then became authoritative for him. The authoritative agent became the master to the other, and the other now became some sort of vassal or subordinate (or even a slave) to the master. Hegel’s dialectic of mastery and servitude intimates the way Hegel’s idealism departed from both Fichte’s and Schelling’s. The largest context in which things show up for experience becomes revealed as the “space of reasons,” what Hegel also calls in his post-1807 discussions of the topic “universal self-consciousness,” the appeal to reason itself.35 However, there is no unmediated access to the space of reasons. Although “reason” always outstrips all of its embodiments—there is always a normative surplus to reason—it nonetheless always appears in a determinate shape, as a set of established social norms. For others to show up as self-conscious agents is for them to show up as having a standing in the space of reasons, and that standing is itself a matter of what shape the space of reasons has come to take. Kant thought that reason itself required us to regard all agents (by virtue of their freedom) as ends in themselves, and Fichte thought that the other agent showed up in experience as demanding equal recognition and thereby as rationally requiring it. Hegel thought that the kind of standing that both Kant and Fichte thought belonged to rational agents in general was in fact an expression of a certain determinate shape that the space of reasons had assumed in early modern European life, which was itself the result of a long historical struggle. Our status as free and equal was an achieved status whose achievement itself depended on the failure and breakdown of earlier and entire systems of domination and servitude. Hegel’s idealism thus claims that it is not the absolute in its own self-identity that is embodying itself in matter and in us (Schelling), nor that the “I” posits itself and the “Not-I” (Fichte), but that the larger context in which anything (things in the world or other agents) shows up in our experience depends on “spirit” (Geist, human mindedness) taking a determinate shape. Although “reason” is “infinite”—reason admits nothing except what follows a plan of its own, as Kant puts it36—reasoners (agents) are finite. They also move within a space of reasons that calls for judgment about that for which there is a reason for belief, action, feeling, etc. Hegel calls this unity of concept and objectivity, or concept and reality, the Idea (Idee), harking back to Kant’s use of the term to express a concept of the whole that, for Kant, can never have a corresponding intuition.37 For Hegel, the Idea is the background against which things can show up in an intuition. Put very generally, the Idea is our conception of our ultimate commitments, a kind of picture of what the world is ultimately like and 35  Thus, the Phenomenology in its Encyclopedia form takes the shape of “consciousness,” whose truth is “self-consciousness,” whose truth is “universal self-consciousness,” whose truth is “reason.” That much can be gathered by only reading the table of contents. 36  Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, p. 20 (Bxiii): “They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining.” 37  Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §213: “Die Idee ist das Wahre an und für sich, die absolute Einheit des Begriffs und der Objektivität.” (English: “The Idea is the true in and for itself, the absolute unity of concept and objectivity.”)

252   Terry Pinkard how that normatively requires certain beliefs, actions, emotions, and the like. (For example, something like the “Christian Idea” is that of a material world created by a beneficent, omnipotent, omniscient God, in which the possibility and reality of evil is always present and in which people are called to a kind of final judgment on their lives.) How that Idea is specified more concretely depends on how it is embodied in concrete practices and institutions. Whereas for Schelling, the Idea is an ideality that pushed itself into embodiment in seeking to restore the original unity of nature, for Hegel, the Idea is the conceptual background (as taken up in habits and practices by agents who live within it) in terms of which certain things show up and others do not. Those ways in which it is specified more concretely in institutions and practices are the actualizations of the Idea. Only in terms of such an Idea do things show up for us as having, for example, artistic or religious significance and do other people show up, for example, as possessing infinite dignity. In his Science of Logic, Hegel gave what he took to be his definitive account of this “Idea.” There his basic claim was that explanatory adequacy requires us to differentiate among three different types of judgments that are made about the world and the unity of mind and world. Each of these types of judgments has to do with the way in which tensions that arise in linking those judgments inferentially to other judgments come to a head in figuring out how to stop various types of infinite regress. The ways such regresses threaten is the following (when put in their classical Pyrrhonian formulation): if to know one thing, one has to know another thing, and to know that other thing, one also has to know yet another thing, then either that series goes on infinitely (in which case in order to know one thing, one has to know an infinite number of things), or the series stops in one thing (that one knows without having to know anything else), or it circles back on itself (in which case there might be many mutually exclusive but non-overlapping series).38 This affects all accounts that deal with things as having their determinateness set by something “external” to them. Hegel’s solution to these kinds of problems is hard to state in any economical way. His overall “logic” had three distinct “logics” within itself. In what he called the logic of “being,” Hegel argued that making the world intelligible to ourselves requires that we have a way of speaking of particulars, namely, by pointing them out (which requires us to distinguish them from each other on the basis of features they have), of classifying them, of making generalizations (such as “American Robins live on average 1.7 years”), or of counting them (“There are twenty Robins in the field”). Each of these types of judgments, when pushed, result in what looks like an infinite regress, which seems only to be stopped by invoking some kind of “given” in the series. It is a long and controversial story, but Hegel argues that one only really understands the series when one grasps the principle of the series, and his paradigmatic example comes from the way that judgments about infinite magnitudes at first seem to require something like infinitesimal numbers (larger than zero, less than any natural number) but which are actually resolved by Leibniz’s and Newton’s construction of the calculus which gives us the “principle” of such series. The calculus (among other things) shows us that we are not required to stop such infinite regresses

38 

Such a way of handling infinite regresses also had to do with Hegel’s relation to modern and ancient skepticism. The definitive treatment of this is Forster, M. N. (1989), Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Idealism   253 by positing some “given” which functions as the ultimate and last member of such a series beyond which we cannot go. Because of such regresses and the various ways of stopping them, such judgments about “being” yield to judgments like “The tie only looks green in the store but is blue in normal sunlight” and “Deficiency in vitamin D may cause cognitive impairment in older adults,” which he calls judgments about “essences,” which themselves get caught in a different type of infinite regress. Such judgments explain an appearance by something else, which if it is to be a genuine explanation has to be both independent of the series and yet at the same time part of the series. The result is that one finds oneself oscillating between claiming that the determinateness of what is doing the explaining is independent of what is being explained only to then find that one grasps the determinateness of what is doing the explaining only by relating it to what it is supposed to explain. Each of the parts of the explanation seems to be both dependent and independent. Once again, once it is clear that what is at stake is explanatory adequacy, this back-and-forth oscillation among essences and appearances yields to a third and different type of judgment, examples of which are “What you just said does not follow from your premises,” or “That makes no sense within the current standards of physics.” If “being” and “essence” are about making sense of things in terms of the ways we must think things to be, then this third set of judgments has to do with “making sense about when we have made sense” of things.39 Ultimately, this requires us to make sense of making sense in the most general and necessary way possible, and that finally pushes us to the “Idea” in Hegel’s use of it. Hegel took this “logic” to be central to his system, since it showed that all of our judgmental activities push us into a conceptual statement about the “infinite” (since they all involve basic infinite regresses and how to stop them). His basic strategy in all his other philosophy was to see how such judgments about infinite regresses and failed attempts at grasping how to resolve them fit into a larger context, which involved denying any kind of “immediacy,” or givenness, as the proper stopping point in philosophical thought. It is nonetheless a key thesis of Hegel’s idealism that there are different Ideas in history, that they succeed each other in historical time, and although there is no grand metaphysical force pushing onward from one Idea to another, there is nonetheless a logic (or, more charitably put, something reasonably like a logic) that has turned out retrospectively to have been at work in the way such Ideas have succeeded each other. An Idea is thus the set of absolute commitments that make up a form of life—make up a Gestalt des Lebens, as Hegel calls it—and forms of life break down when their Idea turns out to be unlivable because of the strains and tensions in that form of life it stirs up in those who orient their lives in terms of such an Idea. Hegel’s idealism is thus also a kind of radical historicism that claims to avoid also being a relativism because, or so Hegel tried to show in various works, each of these Ideas can be seen to be a development of one single Idea, that of the unity of mind and world (but not that of the dependence of the world on the mind). Hegel even had a pithy summary of this Idea for the young students at his lectures (most of them in their

39 

This way of formulating the issue draws heavily on the way the distinctions are drawn in Moore, A. W. (2012), The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. New York: Cambridge University Press.

254   Terry Pinkard teens and early twenties and not always as attentive as professors would like them to be). In the history of the world, there are three such big Ideas at work that are all developments of one Idea. For most of world history, it was accepted that one person was authorized by nature or the gods to rule over all others (Pharaoh, the emperor, etc.). That Idea broke down and left in its wake the Idea that some (aristocrats, the clergy, the most virtuous, etc.) were authorized by nature or God to rule over others. The breakdown of that Idea left in its wake the revolutionary Idea that nobody is by nature or the gods authorized to rule over anybody else, and that legitimate rule thus had to appeal to something else for its legitimation. That Idea came to its explosive and penultimate fulfillment in the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and it reached its penultimate philosophical fulfillment in the writings of Kant and Fichte. The one Idea at work in history that can be seen to be developing itself is that of humanity attempting to understand what it means to be minded agents aware of their own finitude—that is, as Hegel put it, of spirit’s striving to come to a full self-consciousness. Hegel’s vaunted dialectic played a fundamental role in this as the attempted articulation of how it is that an Idea (which is actualized as a determinate unity of mind and world in a form of life, or at the more abstract level as the logic itself of these movements, as a distinctive kind of theoretical take on mind and world) can, under the pressure of its own actualization, generate tensions and contradictions within those who inhabit it such that the form of life itself loses its grip on them, and as their form of life breaks down, they find themselves living within a new Idea whose shape takes on its contours in light of the experienced failure of its predecessor. As “Idea,” the space of reasons develops in history, and as it changes, so do we. In Schelling’s idealism, the world was lumbering its way in and by means of its own potencies (the basic powers of the absolute as they develop themselves) in order to come to a consciousness of itself in human knowers and in God. In Hegel’s idealism, human agents in determinate practices of reciprocally conferring epistemic, aesthetic, ethical and religious authority on each other find themselves within distinct forms of life, and in those distinct forms of life they also find that different things thereby show up for them as the Idea develops. In the modern world, natural science lets the world show up in a distinct way that reveals its indifference to human wishes, and constitutional, representative governments begin to embody the way in which agents now show up as neither masters nor servants but as instead having an equal standing.

12.7  Idealism’s Aftermath After Hegel’s death, the struggle over whether Schelling’s or Hegel’s idealism was the definitive statement went into full throttle. (For rather contingent reasons having to do with academic influence, Fichte’s idealism more or less dropped out of contention.) For the most part, Hegel’s immediate successors—in particular, the leadenly boring G. A. Gabler, Hegel’s successor at Berlin—took him to be more or less a logicized version of Schelling. This Schellingianized Hegel was the Hegel Marx read, but Marx had the acumen to see through this and to pull Hegel back to Hegel’s own idealism before finally rejecting that form of idealism.

Idealism   255 Idealism pretty well died out as an active movement by the 1840s, although Hegel’s own rather contentious version of its history had come to be abstractly accepted. (In that account, Hegel portrayed himself as the endpoint of the development and all others as being fragmentary and unsatisfactory versions of idealism until he had finished the project.) However, in the 1850s, another version of idealism became famous in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. (Schopenhauer’s fame was rather belated since he had published those ideas by 1817.) Schopenhauer basically interpreted Kant in exactly the way Kant did not want to be interpreted: the world of experience was an illusion, and reality was the world of things-in-themselves. The only thing we knew about that real world was revealed to us in our own willing, namely, that the real world was that of an inexorably moving will that ground its parts up as it went along and was also indifferent to us. Even our own individuation was merely a “representation” and our feeling of our freedom was an illusion. The only proper attitude to this was something like resignation and acceptance of death as the release from the illusion itself. Schopenhauer’s lively prose, his elevation of the arts to the highest point of human endeavor, and his own masterful presentation of a kind of gloomy central European version of Buddhism-seen-through-the-lenses-of-Kant made Schopenhauer into the most talked about philosopher of the 1850s and has ensured that his form of idealism—our world is not real, and the real world is something like that of a relentless, non-human process heading in its own, unknown and uncaring direction—has remained a competitor with the other forms of idealism in popular culture and artistic circles ever since. By the end of the century, various other forms of idealism began to appear, almost always under the form of “neo-this” or “neo-that.” The two most popular labels were those of “neo-Kantianism” and (neo)-Hegelianism. (For the most part, curiously, the neo-Hegelians were described as simply Hegelians.) For odd reasons, although the philosophical stance of the (neo-)Hegelians (especially in Britain) much more resembled Schelling’s idealism, Schelling as an equally contending figure seemed to drop out altogether. In Schelling’s place, Hegel, now taken as propounding a doctrine of the absolute as a spiritual entity developing itself in cosmic and human history, played a more central role. (No doubt Schelling’s relative neglect of any concrete philosophy of history and Hegel’s broad claims for history as the unfolding of freedom played a big role in people wanting to assume the title of “Hegelian.”) As the twentieth century rolled around, a revolt against the neo-Schellingians was taken to be a revolt against Hegelianism itself, and that revolt determined a large course of the development of twentieth-century philosophy in both Anglophone and European countries. As the twentieth century ended, a new and much less Schellingian Hegel had started to appear again on the philosophical scene.

Bibliography Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell. Beiser, F. C. (2002). German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Beiser, F. C. (2005). Hegel. New York; London: Routledge. Bowman, B. (2013). Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

256   Terry Pinkard Brinkmann, K. E. (2010). Idealism Without Limits: Hegel and the Problem of Objectivity. trans. B. Bowman. New York: Springer. Förster, E. (2012). The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy:  A  Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Forster, M. N. (1989). Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Frank, M. (1997). “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Franks, P. W. (2005). All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Hartmann, K. (1972). “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays. A. MacIntyre. New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1969). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1970). Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. trans. M. J.  Petry. London and New York: Allen & Unwin and Humanities Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard. Hegel, G. W. F., C. Butler, et al. (1984). Hegel: The Letters. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. and J. Hoffmeister (1961). Briefe von und an Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Heine, H., T. P. Pinkard, et al. (2007). On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Israel, J. I. (2001). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1929). Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. trans. N. K. Smith. London: Macmillan. Kant, I. and W. S. Pluhar (1987). Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co. Kosch, M. (2006). Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kukla, R. and M. N. Lance (2009). “Yo!” and “Lo!”: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Larmore, C. E. (1996). The Romantic Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press. Moore, A.  W. (2012). The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics:  Making Sense of Things. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nicolin, G. (1970). Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen. Hamburg: F. Meiner. Pinkard, T. (2011). “The Social Conditions of Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870). A. W. Wood and S. S. Hahn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, T. P. (2000). Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, T.  P. (2002). German Philosophy, 1760–1860:  The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R.  B. (1989). Hegel’s Idealism:  The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Idealism   257 Pippin, R.  B. (2005). “Concept and Intuition:  On Distinguishability and Separability.”He gel-Studien 40. Pippin, R. B. (2010). Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pöggeler, O. (1993). Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Richards, R. J. (2002). The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenberg, J. F. (1993). “Raiders of the Lost Distinction: Richard Rorty and the Search for the Last Dichotomy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53(1): 195–214. Schelling, F. W. J. v. (1988). Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1797). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Schelling, F.  W. J.  v. and P. L.  Heath (1978). System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Sedgwick, S. S. (2012). Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 13

Rom a n ticism Fred Rush 13.1 Introduction In academic discourse the term “romanticism” most often designates an art-historical period and the term “romantic” a kind of art, whether that art is produced in such a historical period or not. The terms are much less frequently applied to a period or to a type of philosophy.1 The standard periodization of artistic romanticism in Europe runs from its beginnings in the literary proto-romanticism of the German Sturm und Drang and the Ossian craze in the mid-eighteenth century to its end in the vestiges of musical romanticism at the outset of the twentieth century. Philosophical romanticism was limited to a select group of German-speaking, non-academic thinkers, to but two or three hubs of activity, and flourished for only a period of six years (1795 to 1801). By contrast, if one dates the phenomenon of German idealism roughly and conservatively from the publication of the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 to Hegel’s death in 1831 one has a half-century of concerted and systematic philosophy to deal with. And if one is more liberal, as Marx was for instance, and includes Feuerbach, Bauer, and other Left Hegelians among the lot, one moves the endpoint to the mid-1840s. If one counts arid neo-Kantianism in the mix and adds its spandrels in Austria and America, idealism is still with us. Not so its cousin, philosophical romanticism. After its heyday in the last half of the last decade of the eighteenth century in what was to become Germany, philosophical romanticism only reemerges intermittently.

1  See Arthur Lovejoy, “The Meaning of ‘Romantic’ in Early German Romanticism,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), pp. 183–206 on the many meanings of “romanticism” in the German context; see also Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–31. This overview singles out the Jena romantics and Hölderlin in its treatment. A comprehensive account of the philosophical elements in German romanticism would also have to include the aesthetics of Schleiermacher, the Berlin writers Tieck and Wackenroder, as well as outlier figures such as Jean Paul and Kleist.

Romanticism   259

13.2  Jena in the 1790s The University of Jena was in the late eighteenth century the most prestigious center of higher learning in German-speaking lands. Part of that reputation was based in the installation at the university of what was essentially a research cluster for Kantian philosophy. There was a chair founded devoted to such fare, and K. L. Reinhold (1757–1823) was its first occupant. Along with Reinhold another professor was appointed in the philosophy faculty, also a Kantian, and there were two junior positions opened as well in “critical philosophy.” Reinhold had made a name for himself as a conduit for the dissemination of Kant’s philosophy; his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (1786/7) provided an effective, albeit simplified, exposure to several key doctrines of the first (1781) edition of the first Critique. Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was also installed at Jena at this time, finishing his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung (published in 1795), writing his verse dramas, and teaching history. All of this was more or less orchestrated on high with his usual savoir faire comme va savoir by Goethe, who maintained close personal and official connections to the university and town for much of his literary and scientific career—he completed Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre there, arguably the most important literary product in German of the nineteenth century if judged by its influence, as well as Hermann und Dorothea, Dichtung und Warheit, and the Farbenlehre.2 No matter how formidable and cutting-edge the literary and philosophical environment was in and around the university, access for the brightest students to the treasures was possible and indeed encouraged. Again, Goethe’s hand in things—the quality of the way he handled matters—flowed down to the only slightly less luminous, for example, Schiller, and then to the philosophy faculty, all of which created an inviting atmosphere for collaboration in coming to grips with what was commonly seen as the revolutionary nature of Kant’s thought. Reinhold was an immensely popular lecturer and cultivated a devoted group of the best students at the university. But the students were not slavishly devoted to Reinhold’s own attempts to advance what he took to be Kant’s central insights; in fact, these students were highly critical of those attempts, an attitude that Reinhold seems to have open-mindedly welcomed or even encouraged. After appointment to his chair Reinhold put himself to the task of being more than an expositor of Kant. Reinhold was Austrian and had converted to Protestantism from his birth-religion, Roman Catholicism, after undergoing a spiritual crisis. His account in the Briefe of the central teaching of the Critique of Pure Reason seems today highly selective, if not willful. He pays scant attention to the claimed results of the Transcendental Aesthetic on the ideality of time and space, nor does he pause long over the technicalities of the A-Deduction. His libido is, rather, in the Transcendental Dialectic, and in particular those parts of it that address the question of the relation of faith to reason. The combination of the relatively “psychological” approach of the Deduction in the first edition of the Critique with the filter of the concern with issues in the philosophy of religion, cause Reinhold to take a very specific path in his 2 

For Goethe’s poetry as a source for romanticism, see David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

260   Fred Rush extension of Kant. Reinhold held that what he saw to be the rift between reason and faith consequent on Kant’s treatment of the topics could be closed by establishing a basis for the derivation of the dualistic structure of the critical philosophy in one, single principle having to do with “representation” (Vorstellung). Basing the critical philosophy in a single principle also would have the desired effects of making it more accessible to the public and increasing the public’s confidence in it as well-grounded. In a flurry of systematic labor that saw three major works to publication in as many years—Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (1789), Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen (1790), and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791)—Reinhold promoted a view according to which the form of all representation, and therefore all knowledge, could be derived from its basis in the tripartite structure of the “Principle of Consciousness”: representing subject, medium of representation, and represented object. This structure is that of intentionality itself. Fichte, who was to be Reinhold’s successor in the Kantian chair in 1794, attempted to improve on Reinhold’s analysis, a project begun in a review of G. E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, which itself was critical of Reinhold (and of any Kantianism generally) (see Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften3 I,2: 41ff.). Fichte agreed with Schulze that Reinhold’s attempt to base intentional consciousness in an ultimately unifying faculty of representation of the sort proposed raises substantial philosophical problems.4 In some of the standard accounts of the development of philosophical thought in Jena at this time, the arrival of Fichte in Jena—to be sure an event of the first order in terms of general intellectual star-power—is decisive. It is a bit ironic though that some in Jena had already rejected Reinhold’s “Elementary Philosophy” on other, more general grounds. These naysayers were a group of Reinhold’s own students, one led by Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848). Niethammer had come to Jena from his studies at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen and brought with him avidity for Kantian philosophy stripped of philosophical pretension.5 The Reinhold-Kreis, as it might be called if that did not give the impression that its members were supporters of Reinhold’s final pronouncements, dissented over a single issue. Never mind the technical philosophical problems with Reinhold’s principle that Schulze points to, the very idea that the critical philosophy needs to be grounded in a single principle was suspect. Niethammer interpreted Kant as something along the lines of a philosopher of “common sense” (Gemeinsinn), who had taken everyday experience as a “Faktum” and asked after what must be true in order that experience be possible in the first place (granted that it is actual). On this interpretation, which has its present-day adherents, Kant does not respond to skepticism by attempting to refute it by proving that experience is possible.6 To be sure, Kant does not ignore the skeptic altogether on such accounts, and in that sense he is perhaps not just a common-sense philosopher. But the emphasis on common sense does preserve at least the general contour of Reinhold’s initial concern 3 

Henceforth abbreviated to GA. A synopsis of Fichte’s critique is given in section 13.3. 5  See section 13.4, for discussion of the Tübinger Stift and the intellectual forces at work there during Niethammer’s time and shortly thereafter. 6  See Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 64–6. 4 

Romanticism   261 with spreading the Kantian word: if Kant is really “modest” in this way it may well provide an encouragement to steel oneself for the onslaught of Kantian arcana. In any event, the Niethammer circle’s criticism of Reinhold would seem to veer from the path Fichte takes. The inherent anti-foundationalism of that reception of Reinhold shortcircuits Fichte’s concern to discover a competitor principle to ground the diversity of apparently conflicting elements in Kant’s philosophy. For this reason Fichte might have seemed old hat to the more pragmatically-minded of the Reinhold-Kreis. But the Niethammer group was somewhat insular; moreover, Fichte’s personal and philosophical charisma was not to be discounted. He too was critical of certain brands of foundationalism, had gone to print with the criticism, and pledged fealty to the “spirit” if not the letter of Kant. And, even if the “common sense” view of Kant had won the day as an antidote to Reinhold, it was not yet clear how that response would shore up the faith–reason relationship that had motivated Reinhold. Fichte cut his teeth on just this stuff—his first significant publication, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792) deals in it—and, so, his new presence in Jena not only brought another sort of student there, one with an appetite for issues concerning foundationalism or critiques that do not skirt the question of foundationalism, but also muted for a time the more pragmatic bent.

13.3  The “Romantic School”: Novalis and Schlegel Two of these new students were the most important philosophical thinkers of what came to be known as the Jena Circle, Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pseudonym “Novalis” (1772–1801), and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). At the epicenter of the “Romantic School,” as Heine called it, were the brothers Schlegel. August Wilhelm, the elder by five years, was a gifted literary critic whose verse translations of the plays of Shakespeare (edited and sometimes altered by Ludwig Tieck) are landmarks of German literature. He began as a Hellenist, but came into his own in the early to mid-1790s as a contributor to Schiller’s journal Die Horen. This activity coincided with the decision of the younger Friedrich to leave his legal studies and devote himself instead to the study of literature, also with a heavy emphasis on classics. An intensive autodidactic study of Greek literature and rhetoric occupied Friedrich Schlegel for three years until 1796. During this period of his career, Friedrich launched a brilliant literary career with several precocious essays in the periodical Deutschland, edited by the influential Johann Friedrich Reichardt. His success continued in Reichardt’s successor journal, the Lyceum. August meanwhile relocated to the Netherlands to take a position as a private tutor. Schiller arranged for his 1796 resettlement in Jena. With Friedrich’s literary star still on the rise, this time tethered to an explicitly Jacobin journal set up to challenge Schiller’s own more measured responses to the Revolution, the elder Schlegel cast his lot with his brother.7 7  The relationship between the Schlegels and Schiller was precarious at best, as was that of the Jena School and Weimar classicism in general, and Schiller and the Schlegels fell out irreparably shortly

262   Fred Rush Friedrich Schlegel’s years as a law student in Leipzig were not entirely wasted, for it was then that he first met Novalis, who was also pursuing legal studies.8 Novalis had spent some time prior to Leipzig at the university in Jena in the period when Reinhold came to hold the chair of philosophy. In 1793 Novalis moved on to Wittenberg at the insistence of his Pietist father, completing his degree in 1794 and relocated after to Tennstedt to take up duties in the family business of administrating mines. During this time Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel carried on an important philosophical correspondence in which both describe their investigations into Fichte’s philosophy. Novalis had planned to come to Jena with Schlegel to continue his studies with Fichte, but broke it off, remaining in Thuringia. Schlegel moved to Jena in summer of 1796, but quickly departed for Berlin, opening up to him the best literary circles in the German-speaking lands outside Weimar. It was there that he met Tieck, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Tieck’s friend the writer and music theoretician W. H. Wackenroder. Like Schlegel, Schleiermacher was steeped in Greek literature and philosophy, particularly in Plato. Although Schleiermacher was never to travel to Jena, he helped Schlegel in numerous intellectual projects, including the editing of what was to become, in its short life, the house organ for Jena romanticism, the Athenaeum. Schlegel returned to Jena only in autumn of 1799. There he lived in a group house with his wife Dorothea, his brother’s wife Caroline, A. W. Schlegel, and Novalis. In 1799 he brought out the novel Lucinde, which was denounced by many as pornographic. Tieck, closely associated with the literary goals of the Schlegels, was also in residence at Jena at the time, as was Schelling. In the interim Fichte had been forced from the university under the cloud of the so-called “atheism controversy.” All told, the main protagonists of the Jena school were only all in Jena for approximately one year. Athenaeum, which had first appeared in May of 1798, ceased publication in 1801. For all intent and purposes, Jena romanticism was finished.9 It is difficult to establish a univocal connection between Schlegel and the systematic concerns of German idealism. His philosophical writing is often aphoristic and deeply formed by his literary concerns. The same complexity affected the case of Novalis as well until the discovery in the early twentieth century of papers containing his criticism of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.10 These notes are still far from a rigorous, systematic consideration thereafter. Some of Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien are barely concealed satires of the Schlegels, payment in kind for the unfriendly press Schiller was receiving at their hands. 8  “Novalis” can mean either a freshly ploughed field, or one not yet cultivated. This last meaning seems to be the one intended as a translation of the family name “Hardenberg.” 9  This is not to say of course that the literary and philosophical careers of its principals did not continue. Novalis’ death in 1801 from pulmonary disease robs us of any real indication of the arc of his thought after his Jena days. A. W. Schlegel lectured successfully in Berlin on a range of topics, finally accepting a position in the household of Mde. de Staël in 1804, which he was to occupy until her death in 1817. He moved to Bonn in 1818 and remained there until his death in 1845. Friedrich Schlegel continued his literary criticism, moved to Paris, wrote a play Alarcos that had its première at the royal theater in Weimar, and branched out into art criticism, much of which was circulated in his new journal Europa. His philosophical views underwent significant change, becoming, like Schelling’s, much more conservative. After the years 1804–8 spent in Köln, Schlegel moved to Vienna where he was a cultural apologist for Metternich. He died in 1829. 10  Fichte published a separate text, intended by him as a short introduction for students wanting to attend his lectures called “Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre” (GA I,2: 109–54). This text is often bundled together with the 1794 version of the Wissenschaftslehre for purposes of publication (often together with a “second” introduction Fichte wrote later for his 1797–9 iteration of the system).

Romanticism   263 of Fichte’s position, but they are focused directly at a single philosophical target of great importance, not only in Jena but, increasingly, in all of the German-speaking lands. These Fichte-Studien,11 as the papers have come to be known, have taken pride of place in setting out the philosophical doctrines of the Jena circle in the minds of many scholars. The notes are quite important and do open up serious study of Jena romanticism in ways that were not possible before. But it is mistaken, I believe, to allow them to obscure the importance of Schlegel. Fichte’s account of intentional consciousness is intended to provide a theoretical foundation in the form of a principle. In this he does not differ with Reinhold; the difference lies in the content of the principle. The standard criticism of Reinhold, and one the correctness of which he came quickly to acknowledge, is that “representation” could not be the content of the principle because it was not a properly basic concept. Fichte substitutes for the concept of representation that of positing (see GA I,2: 255–82). Positing has something like the tripartite structure of Reinhold’s representation, with the innovation that it is a pre-intentional (namely an unconscious) activity. For several reasons, both concerning his views on the nature of the activity and due to its unconscious status, Fichte takes it that his formulation of the foundational principle circumvents the difficulties with Reinhold’s Principle. In a way Novalis grants the truth of this claim on Fichte’s part; Fichte’s Tathandlung, as he later calls it, is not subject to precisely the objections directed against Reinhold. But Fichte’s account fails another test. Since Schiller, one of the primary desiderata confronting a systematic rendering of the relation of mind to world was that such an account would show that the basic components of subjectivity are in harmony with one another. There are many conceptions of harmony of course; in this case the conception was rather strict. Basic components of subjectivity were only in harmony to the extent that they all emerged from the same source, that is, to the extent that they were unified by something in which they were initially identical. Fichte violates this precept because the Tathandlung is, in its basic form, internally articulated in terms of a subject–object distinction, no matter how much Fichte attempts to tighten the necessary reciprocity of the elements they are still elements in relation, and being in a relation defeats identity. This is so because such identity is not “absolute.” Relational identity—identity of the kind expressed in identity statements like “Cicero is Tully” or even “I am me”—is the way philosophers try to model absolute identity in a judgment of subject-predicate form. But try though one may to model the simplicity and unification of subjectivity on first-person identity statements, they are really results of discursive overlay on absolute identity. They are the way that one must think of such identity, but that does not mean that such statements accurate chart such identity (FS I: 3, 5, 17–25, 38–50; NS II: 106–7, 114–22, 129–39). They are artifacts of a discursive structuring of identity. Absolute identity is selfsameness, completely non-relational and internally simple. It follows, Novalis holds, that absolute identity cannot be experienced, because experience is ineluctably discursive. Subjectivity requires duplicity (i.e. the minimal distinction between thought and object), and any principle of subjectivity, that is, which principle would be within the scope

This shorter text, along with the lectures themselves, forms the basis for Novalis’ analysis of Fichte’s position. 11 

Henceforth abbreviated to FS.

264   Fred Rush of subjectivity such that it could be known to be foundational (which is after all what is required from a purported foundation), would require the same. The conclusion is similar to Niethammer’s but is based in an analysis of what Novalis takes to be Fichte’s foundationalism that is considerably more charitable to the very idea of seeking principles as grounds. Novalis’ conclusion is that there is no principle of subjectivity that could be experienced to be its ground. But, because the impetus to orient oneself some way toward the ground for subjectivity is constitutive of subjectivity, according to the Jena romantics, reflection does not, so to speak, wait mildly at the threshold of “the absolute.” To seek a principle in the ground may be, to put it in a Kantian vein, parallogistic, but affirming the ground in the form of a principle does not exhaust possibilities. For the romantics two main alternatives remain: one involving the category of feeling and another that involves the category of inversion. Novalis is often taken to be the avatar of feeling (Gefühl) (FS I: 15–17, 32, 47; NS II: 113–15, 126–7, 136). It is important at the outset of discussing the role of feeling in Jena romanticism to remark that, whatever feeling affords the subject relative to her ground, it will not be “experience” or anything else on the basis of which a deductive, systematic account of subjectivity and its connection to the world could be based. “Feeling” does not confer the status of principle on a ground that is not subject to discursive capture. Jena romanticism then is not, as it is often taken to be, a veiled form of Platonism. Quite to the contrary, Novalis’ use of the concept of feeling is a piece of transcendental philosophy, in which he reasons that the ground of subjectivity cannot find expression in what it grounds in such a way that the grounded controls the ground “spontaneously.” What Novalis claims here is that reflective thought is grounded in a basic form of subjectivity and cannot be conceived of as active with regard to what grounds it. He is concerned to make this point because of a standing prejudice about the spontaneous sovereignty of thought present especially in the wake of Kant’s philosophy. Relative to what it conditions, that is, “possible experience,” reflection is the active, formal principle; Novalis is a good Kantian in that regard. But reflective thought is not itself unconditioned nor does it have an unconditioned principle given to it as such. Thought is with regard to its ground passive—at least it must be thought of as passive with regard to its relation to its ground. This is the role of feeling; the concept does not so much register for Novalis sentiment or inwardness (although it does take on such a character in his thought at times), rather it tokens the way the contiguity of the domains of the non-conceptual and the conceptual must be marked from the conceptual side. The ground is what is active in producing what is grounded by it; what is grounded is patient to what grounds it. Novalis’ discussion of feeling is not without interest but, without careful interpretation, it reinforces the stereotype of romanticism as a cult of feeling at the expense of cognition. More engaging and less potentially misleading is the discussion of inversion as a strategy for replicating in experience the relation between subjectivity and its ground. Here what bounds and constitutes subjective experience, discursive thought, is itself deployed to show that limitation, and to model in its own terms the absolute as that which exceeds any conceptual determination. It is the elusiveness of the absolute that can be shown. It is here that Schlegel proves to be the deeper thinker, that is, in connection with the issue of how the impact of the absolute may be modeled in terms of experience. But Novalis also offers two such regimens. The first of these is what he calls the ordo inversus, an indirect discursive procedure that models the basic discursive categories

Romanticism   265 in their discursivity under the controlling idea that they stem from a non-discursive source (see FS I: 32, 36, 44, 65; NS II: 126–7, 128, 133–4, 142–3).12 To illustrate the process Novalis deploys a visual analogy. “Inversus” has a specialized meaning in optics, where it refers to mirror-imaging. When one looks in a mirror one sees oneself represented in a way that tempts the thought that what is in the mirror is visually identical to what stands before the mirror. But even a child can tell that images in a plane mirror are not visually identical to what they represent. A mirror-image of a thing is reversed left–right; mirrors present inverted images of what they represent. Novalis’ idea is that this applies to the concept of reflection itself. The idea that reflection is ontologically basic is a byproduct of reflection itself—of it looking for itself in its own mirror—and is, thus, an inversion. Ordo inversus requires one to see the investigation of the root of reflection as always involving reflectionproduced artifacts: all that one gets are inversions of the first article, not something independent of it. This is the first stage of ordo inversus, what one might call its “diagnostic” aspect. But ordo inversus also has a second, “constructive” stage in which the inversion itself is inverted. This does not “correct” the inversion back to an original form which is non-representational: to mirror a mirror-image is not to have a non-mirrored image; it is to have an image twice-mirrored. Rather, it makes inversion itself thematic, self-consciously nesting the first inversion in a further one to which it is necessarily related. The moral is that extrapolation of even base reflective constraints from the absolute is an illusion, one that encourages the idea that some sort of Ur-reflection must be a ground for reflection. The more one attempts to represent basic subjectivity the more one heaps reflection upon reflection—something that one is fated to do, yet at the same time, something about which one must be circumspect. The second regimen of inversion is what Novalis terms “romanticizing” (Romantisieren) (see FS I: 37; NS II: 384). Romanticizing is a process also with two aspects, each of which corresponds to one element in what Novalis thinks is the essential tension inherent in living reflectively under conditions of the absolute. On the one hand, the philosopher makes the commonplace or ordinary extraordinary, even supernatural. Novalis calls this part of the romanticizing procedure “potentializing” (Potenzierung),13 holding that it contrasts the ordinary with the “infinite.” This requires the philosopher-poet to treat the given objects of the world (i.e. objects under given schemes of interpretation) as nevertheless only problematically given by showing what they “are not.” In order to accomplish this, the poet dislodges objects from their customary contexts and translates them into foreign contexts that render the objects strange. Second, romanticizing involves treating the infinite, mysterious, or extraordinary as ordinary. This practice accounts for the abundance of supernatural effects in Novalis’ fiction, patterns that are treated as if they were as natural laws. Combining the two aspects of romanticizing— making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary—imposes tasks upon one to invert the conventional priority given to the value of fixity in experience. If one performs these imaginative operations and admits them as broadly constitutive of experience, as Novalis advocates, this could very well have the effect on the subject of disorienting and jostling one’s sense of security in a given mode of thought. But the ontological

12 

See Manfred Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung.” Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 802ff. for an excellent discussion. 13  A term Novalis in all likelihood borrows from Schelling.

266   Fred Rush point is primary: romanticizing is a circumspect way of expressing the elusive absolute by proliferating representations of the possible that run contrary to the sense of stability one might take from the ordinary run of life. Schlegel hopes to meet the challenge of expressing the elusiveness to conceptual capture of the ground for subjectivity by inducing an experience in his reader of just that elusiveness. It is the experience of a kind of indeterminacy, and being precise about what kind of indeterminacy is at issue is crucial for entering the orbit of Schlegel’s conception: his account of irony. Subjects are situated in concrete forms of life that are constituted, constrained, and individuated by more or less coherent and reasonably stable stocks of beliefs, desires, feelings, moods, habits, and so on. Each of these forms of life, if made the object of philosophical reflection, will be seen to involve certain core commitments in terms of which things are significant. Being embedded in a particular form of life largely provides the basis for one’s self-understanding and to that extent one must affirm that form of life’s point of view on the world. Schlegel treats this affirmation as one of two components of irony. If one reflects with sufficient acumen one will also realize that there are other possible variations in what the world might be like for others situated in other forms of life that are different from one’s own to varying degrees. There are any number of ways to interpret the world as basically meaningful, expressed in concrete forms of thought and action, the consideration of which drives home the point crucial to a correct view on the nature of subjectivity that the absolute evades capture in the finite terms constitutive of subjectivity, even where those finite terms are in their own concrete domains and in their own rights fundamentally orienting: any given state of affairs must fail to be constitutive of one’s identity as such. Although one cannot help but be beholden to the customs and principles governing one’s form of life (“affirm” them in Schlegel’s sense), one registers within one’s given form of life the fact that qua a form of life it is but one of many expressions of the absolute. Schlegel claims on this basis that a criticism of the appropriate rigor will balance distancing of oneself from one’s perspective with the affirmation of the perspective. This distancing is the second element in irony. Taken as a whole irony, then, involves an acute yet circumspect awareness of one’s own form of life as a form of life, that is, as not definitive of one. It is simultaneously an affirmation and critical distancing from the normative and identity-constituting features of one’s own concrete way of being. Put another way, irony is the acknowledgment that forms of life are “partial” in both senses of the word: those who share them are partial to them, yet should recognize they are but partial ways of representing things. Schlegel expresses the balance between the two components of irony as a tension of those components and does so in three main ways. Perhaps the most famous characterization involves the idea that the ironist—one who embraces irony with all clarity—“oscillates” between “self-creation” (Selbstschöpfung) and “self-annihilation” (Selbstvernichtung) (AFr. 51, F. Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 14 2: 172; see also LFr. 43, 48, KFSA 2: 149, 153; AFr 51, KFSA 2: 172–3; PhL Beilage I, i:13; I, vi; I: l).15 The idea here is that, prescinding 14 

Henceforth abbreviated to KFSA. See Fred Rush, “Irony and Romantic Subjectivity,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. N. Kompridis (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 173–95. For a synopsis of the Kantian components to the view, see Rush, “Kant and Schlegel,” in Akten des 9. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. V. Gerhardt, R.-P. Horstmann & R. Schumacher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), III: 618–25. 15 

Romanticism   267 from certain invariant logical features that dictate discursive judgment form and perception, selves are constructs that attain what stability they have relative to the forms of life in which they develop. Irony requires one to engage in the project of being a self within a given form of life, but also requires distancing from the form of life which perforce exerts a destabilizing effect on identity and thus on one’s conception of oneself. Irony, that is, mandates a reciprocal but non-assimilative relation between thinking of one’s form of life as staving off negation and embracing it. A variant to this first way of contrasting the twin poles of irony that is more explicitly indebted to Fichte adds to the two structural elements above a third, mediate term, “self-limitation” (Selbstbeschränkung) (LFr. 37, KFSA 2: 150). Here Schlegel is characterizing the effect on the subject of holding the two prior elements together. Taking sustenance from one’s own form of life and at the same time recognizing that there are other (possibly quite incompatible) modes of doing the same that offer substance to others, Schlegel holds, has the effect of reigning in the sense of completion and self-satisfaction one would likely have were one to view one’s form of life as exclusively value-giving. Yet a third way Schlegel expresses the same point—one that brings ontology to the foreground—is that irony allows an “intimation” (Ahnung) of the absolute (I. 69, KFSA 2: 263). What Schlegel means here is precisely not that irony is a substitute for the discredited idea of intellectual intuition. Not only would this commit Schlegel to a concept of immediate access to the absolute that he rejects along with Novalis, it is also clear that irony, bifurcated as it is, could never hope to structurally fit the bill. Instead, Schlegel intends merely to recapitulate points already considered: a thing intimates something else when it exhibits features of its own that indicate the other thing. This tracks common usage of course: intimation is precisely not a mode of direct access. In this case the feature that irony exhibits is a plurality of possible forms of life and what that intimates is that the absolute, as a source of such forms, is not exhausted by any one of them. Irony is, in a sense, a transcendental principle of apperception for him, but only in a sense. It is necessary, synthetic, but does not deliver unwavering identity. It rather grounds a process of unending self-formation that is not necessarily “progressive” in any philosophical standard sense (any progress would be heavily contextual and depend a great deal on contingent factors). In sum, one might do worse than think that the pressing question that motivates early German romanticism is that of emergence: on what basis and how does a new form of life come from an old one? What counts as “new” for them is not merely a novel twist in a paradigm already given and accepted. The idea rather is under what conditions is an original way of life possible. This question was not for the romantics merely scholastic, answering it was not an attempt to intervene in an academic dispute or to round off a prior treatment of a philosophical concern. Answering the question was a matter of general cultural orientation and that, in turn, means a matter of understanding how life was to be understood and undertaken. This sense of cultural urgency is present in Kant, and its expression grows more explicit in the idealism of Fichte, Schiller, and Schelling, but it is with the Jena romantics that the lived aspect of the question and of its answer is most palpable. Whatever the new form of life consists in, philosophy is not merely a spectator to its instantiation; it is, rather, a proper part of the form of life. Herder’s reflection on the conditions for cultural emergence and unity, his emphasis on pre-conceptual and linguistic modes of social organization, and his insistence that evaluating cultures not involve armchair prejudice all impressed upon romanticism the contingency, and thus the at hand possibility, of cultural renewal. (It is important for Hegel as well.) The address to

268   Fred Rush the question must be theoretical, but not merely so. Theories can have cultural effects but those effects are not transformative on their own. Even Marx’s views, to name a theory with a great deal of social force, were not effective through sheer theoretical fiat. Marx knew this well; no one was going to satisfy the Eleventh Thesis by writing a treatise. The Jena romantics appreciated this point and did so by implementing various forms of philosophical address—both to foster interchange within the romantic circle (what they called Symphilosophieren) and to convince others to consider seriously the question of inaugurating a new form of life. There was a renewed place within philosophy for rhetoric, poetry, novelistic prose, and even myth. But this is not all. The Jena romantics were dedicated to the project of not spoiling the investigation into emergence by seeding it with prior systematic philosophical aims. They are interested in philosophy taking part in the emergence and commenting on it at the same time. They are not at all concerned to argue back from a stable society taken for granted to its conditions. The group organized around Schlegel and Novalis in Jena conceived of itself as an experiment in thinking and living. The negative assessments of Fichte’s form of monadic foundationalism were crucial in clearing the ground for the experiment to take place but the experiential disciplines of inversion that both Novalis and Schlegel proposed for coming to grips with the realization that what grounds subjects cannot be experienced by those subjects were far from arid regulative posits. The regimens in question involved imaginative forays into the possibilities latent in the philosophical and literary environment in the late eighteenth century across Europe (and beyond in some cases) and then drawing “real time” philosophical consequences from those experiences. Hegel’s project of seeking ultimate conceptual stability while attempting to do justice to the multiplicity of philosophical options is a descendant of romanticism but is also at right angles to the Jena view. This difference with the Hegelian attempt to accommodate a great deal of rich dialectical diversity within unitary structures accounts for the first stage in the reception history of Jena romanticism, whose most important figures are Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel’s extremely adverse reaction to what he considered to be the dangerous aspects of Jena romanticism as a historical matter sealed the philosophical fate of German romanticism as a form of thought with which one had to reckon for quite some time. Hegel singles out Schlegel for poor treatment, all but identifying Schlegel’s dialectical irony with what is termed “Evil” (Böse) in the Phenomenology (Hegel, Werke16 3: 485f.). Irony seems also to be associated with several aspects of end-stage romantic art and aesthetics that he dislikes, what he terms in his Lectures on Aesthetics “subjective humor” (HW 14: 229–31). He sometimes seems to discount such art—and this would be most of the German romantic art that modernists consider valuable—to not be art at all (see HW 15: 496–7). The tenor of Hegel’s reaction to Jena romanticism may be governed by the proximity of its conception of dialectic to his own.17 Hegel realizes this, placing “Evil” (aside from returns to questions of the social significance of religion) next to his own “absolute knowing.” Some of Hegel’s views of early German romanticism are colored by his reception of them through a synopsis provided by K. W. F. Solger, which Hegel reviewed in publication. Hegel seems 16 

Henceforth abbreviated as HW. It is worth noting in this connection that Hegel visited some of Schlegel’s 1800–1 Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy, which also outline in more formal terms a dialectical system based in the identification–distance binary. 17 

Romanticism   269 to have considered Solger’s view on the nature of irony final and credits him with anticipating Hegel’s own dialectical analysis of late romantic art (HW 11: 237). Regardless of provenance, Hegel’s complaint is clear. Any determination worth its salt will be treated by Schlegel ironically, as an interpretation that at one and the same time is both put forward as a point of orientation and is subject to potential disavowal. Hegel holds that this conception of cognitive regard is incoherent because potential disavowal is so corrosive of orientation that the only self-understanding of its own force that subjects might attain under these circumstances is in the sheer ability to pass between thoughts. Hegel interprets Schlegel’s irony as a form of dialectical stasis, in which “negative” and “positive” elements—distance and affirmation—are conjoined with the effect that, at their optimum, they cancel one another out. There is no conceptual advance in such a case, merely interpretation and re-interpretation ad libitum. There is dialectical drive—irony is truly dialectical, but it does not and cannot drive itself forward. On Hegel’s understanding of it irony cannot help but collapse back into one of its aspects: cognitive distance. Irony cannot be a form of existence because it is not a form of commitment, at least not a form of commitment that survives reflective scrutiny. Kierkegaard presents a more complex case of reception and a much more subtle understanding of the potentialities of Jena romanticism. Kierkegaard’s dissertation, On the Concept of Irony (1841), in many ways adopts Hegel’s (and Solger’s) assessment of Schlegel, but then argues for a much more positive role for a suitably adapted romantic irony. This is a precursor to Kierkegaard’s later development of “controlled irony” and “humor” as boundary conditions between, respectively, (1) the aesthetic and ethical and (2) the ethical and religious “spheres of existence” in works like Either—Or and Stages on Life’s Way. In these works, and other interconnected ones, Kierkegaard in essence triangulates Socratic irony, romantic irony, and Hegelian dialectic in order to fashion both a critique of Hegelianism and a new conception of philosophical irony. A second stage of the philosophical reception of Jena romanticism took place in the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century in Germany. Dilthey is the main figure here, a polymath whose intellectual interests extended in many directions, mirroring the romantic refusal to specialize at the expense of integrity. Dilthey’s study of the romantics was placed in service to his own version of “life philosophy,” deploying his interpretation of romanticism in part to reclaim for himself a version of Kant over and against rivals. The other main interpreter of Jena romanticism in this second wave was Walter Benjamin, whose dissertation on the subject remains a watershed document.18 It contains an extremely astute, if incomplete, analysis of the aesthetics of Novalis and Schlegel and also provides a window into Benjamin’s own version of dialectical thought. Because Benjamin’s thought was largely untouched by Hegelianism, his reworking of romanticism provides one with a conception of dialectic that is drawn directly from the resources of romanticism, entirely circumventing Hegelian recasting. This internalization of Jena romanticism in Benjamin would later be reformulated (with significant Hegelian modifications) into Adorno’s idea of negative dialectics. 18  Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann & H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977ff.), I.1: 7–122; see also Fred Rush, “Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology,” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. B. Hanssen & A. Benjamin (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 123–46.

270   Fred Rush

13.4 Hölderlin If one judges according to standard views about what counts as philosophical writing Hölderlin’s philosophical output is miniscule, consisting of a single page, written front and back in 1795, known by the title given to it by Friedrich Beißner, one of the editors of the Stuttgart edition of Hölderlin’s work. “Urteil und Sein” (StA IV: 216–17) does not stand completely alone, however, if one includes as philosophical the epistolary novel Hyperion (particularly its preface), several lyric poems, and short texts composed in poetics that are often read in conjunction with the lyrics. So powerful and elusive are these latter materials that some among Hölderlin’s philosophical admirers accord them preemptory status. Hölderlin began his studies at the Lutheran theological seminary in Tübingen, where he developed his interests in companionship with his friends and roommates Schelling and Hegel. The three were well-matched: Schelling was the lightning-quick best boy, Hegel the stolid but slightly slower hale fellow and Hölderlin the one soulful in temperament. Hölderlin, like his two friends, was formed by two primary intellectual forces at the seminary and by one monumental historical event. The first of the intellectual forces could hardly have been avoided, short of the students being completely cloistered: a book of letters written by F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819) to the great Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) on the alleged deathbed “conversion” of G. E. Lessing (1729–81) to Spinozism. Whatever one thought about the veracity of the report, Jacobi’s publication was a bombshell detonated in the midst of an already volatile situation, unleashing the idea that Lessing, a paragon of the Christian German Enlightenment, was an “atheist” and “nihilist.”19 A second influence was an interpretation of the ramifications of Kant’s “critical philosophy” for the relation of faith to reason forwarded by a “repeater” at Tübingen, Carl Immanuel Diez.20 The combined effect of these two sets of considerations was to heighten the sense among the gifted fellow students that they were preparing for the wrong careers—both Hölderlin and Hegel considered leaving the seminary to study law elsewhere, although they both in the end persisted and received their degrees from the Stift. This sense could only have been deepened by the political events in France that found their way even into Swabian seminary life; all three celebrated the early stages of the French Revolution as emancipating and fervently hoped to see revolutionary political thought extend eastward.

19  See Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), chs. 2 and 3. 20  Repetenten were advanced students charged with tutoring students for examinations by providing synopses of professors’ lectures (hence, “repeating” them). They enjoyed a kind of semi-autonomy in the presentation of material, however, and Diez forwarded his fairly radical account of the degree to which Kant’s philosophy upset standard accounts of faith by these means. Diez’s critique of religion on Kantian grounds predates the publication of Kant’s own Religionsschrift. For a full accounting of Diez’s influence on the development of German idealism, see Dieter Henrich, Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790–1794 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), I: §§ iii–viii. A very comprehensive selection of Diez’s philosophical correspondence and manuscripts are collected in Immanuel Carl Diez, Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften, ed. D. Henrich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997).

Romanticism   271 As crucial as Hölderlin’s friendships with Schelling and Hegel were for his development, it was his slightly older friend from the Stift, Niethammer, who helped Hölderlin find a path out of the confines of the seminary after his graduation in 1793. Hölderlin had secured a post as a family tutor in lower Franconia thanks to a recommendation from Schiller. He was isolated there, however, and quickly sought a way out. Niethammer had taken up teaching duties at the university in Jena and facilitated Hölderlin’s immersion in the philosophical and literary life there. Hölderlin reacquainted himself with Schiller and, in quick order, met Goethe and Novalis, and attended Fichte’s inaugural lectures on his just-published first version of the Wissenschaftslehre, which Hölderlin had read avidly. Schiller published part of what was to become the novel Hyperion in the journal Thalia, and Niethammer did the same with several of Hölderlin’s essays in his Philosophisches Journal. Hölderlin remained in Jena for a six-month period, during which time his philosophical thought jells. Niethammer was no mere go-between; we saw already that his circle of anti-foundationalists were more or less inured to the attractions of more systematic, first-principle driven philosophy, and they provided a ready social receptacle for the young Hölderlin. There is evidence in scattered correspondence that Hölderlin found this way of thinking about Fichte significant, although he was not at all dismissive of Fichte’s attempts to further systematize Kant’s philosophy in a subjective principle and the precise impact of Niethammer’s thought is difficult to measure. What is certain is that Hölderlin comes to reject the very idea that the source of subjectivity might be an unconditioned principle from which one can draw inferences which both explain and justify discrete modes of experience; this is the core doctrine of “Urteil und Sein,” written during a time when Hölderlin is still embroiled in Fichte’s Jena thought.21 Hölderlin begins by accepting, perhaps arguendo, that self-consciousness is a necessary, unifying condition on consciousness. In doing so, he aligns himself with Fichte, and against Kant’s more modest position that the possibility of self-consciousness is a requirement on consciousness. What Fichte means by “self-consciousness” here is not of course what Kant means by it. For Kant selfconsciousness is a reflective state that takes the content of conscious states as its objects; such self-consciousness might be implicit, but it can always be made explicit by drawing attention to itself. For Fichte, some self-consciousness can be as Kant construes it, but basic self-consciousness is implicit, even unconscious, structurally expressing the tripartite form of self-positing. Self-positing is itself a posit: something the philosopher is bound to accept, on pains of incoherence in her account of how discrete conscious states which take discrete objects as their content, are so much as possible. This is a philosophical construct and cannot be an experience. (This is why Fichte does not believe that requiring actual self-consciousness to accompany each and every mental state is in contravention of Kant’s requirement that each state be such that one may be self-conscious of it.) From the requirement that the unity of consciousness involve self-consciousness Hölderlin reasons that the unity requires a distinction between subject of consciousness and object of consciousness, even where object of consciousness is the subject. In this

21 

The best short treatment of this essay is still Dieter Henrich, “Hölderlin über Urteil und Sein,” in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch [1966]: 73–96; see also his Der Grund im Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), esp. §§ 15–30.

272   Fred Rush way two orders of unity are brought into tension. On the one hand, there is a demand that consciousness be unified prior to reflective awareness of that unity and, on the other, any reflective self-consciousness will unify the subject via diversity between subject and object. In effect, these two “orders,” as I have called them, track Fichte’s conception of basic self-consciousness, in the first instance, and Kant’s, in the second. Fichte holds that the second order must presuppose the first, and Hölderlin seems to agree. But any subjective state or activity, even an unconscious one of the posits, is diverse at least to the extent that the state or activity entails a distinction or “separation” (Teilung) between subject and object. This will be true, Hölderlin seems to hold, regardless of how much one attempts to evaporate out of the structure of subjectivity such a separation. Subjectivity cannot itself be a unified condition; to be a subject at all, even minimally conceived, is to be “reflective” and thus self-separated. Now, one might stop here; and if one did, one might well revert to mere Kantianism. It is constitutive of subjectivity that there is this separation, no matter how much one might wish otherwise, but one cannot press beyond this except by speculation that will never yield a principle. In this sense, one might see Kant as forwarding a “tragic” idealism. But Hölderlin does not stop here. He banks the results: (1) that there can be no subjective principle upon which to base a philosophical “science” of human experience and knowledge and (2) that, moreover, there can be no principle whatsoever, subjective or objective, for that basis and then asks after the value and status of the human impetus to foundational thought in light of those findings. He concludes that he has something qualified that he can say further, which involves conceiving of the ground of thought otherwise than as a principle. Hölderlin’s thought involves, as did Schlegel’s and Novalis’, a reconceiving of the idea of a ground (Grund) for philosophical reflection. This distinction between principle and ground can seem more explicit in Hölderlin than in Schlegel and Novalis, and there is a reason for this. Such a ground, Hölderlin holds, would have to be one in which all forms of separation were unified in such a way that there is no differentiation. The ground would be, thus, not itself subjective, nor would it be objective. Nor would it merely ground subjectivity, nor objectivity in terms of subjectivity. It would ground independently both subjectivity and objectivity. The ground would be such that the division between subjective and objective would arise from it without characterizing it; objects and subjects are thus not merely extrusions of other less canonically subjective or objective aspects of the ground. Such division disrupts (stört) the unity of the absolute; things do not merely emerge from it in terms of their latency. Since the unity of subjects is already at a remove from this aboriginal unity in oneness, subjects at even their most unified qua subjects (or objects in the same way) are products of the disruption. Hölderlin uses the term “being” (Seyn) to refer to this absolute that is neither subject nor object, yet comprehends the source of both. Moreover, Hölderlin treats discursivity even at minimal and basic levels as a species of judgment. Judgment can have no access to this ground; judgment arises from a fundamental separation of what is unified at the most basic ontological stratum, a state of affairs that Hölderlin attempts to capture when he suggests whimsically that the etymology of the German word meaning judgment, “Urteilung,” signifies a primordial separation (i.e. Ur-Teilung) (StA IV: 216). To be grounded in this way is, thus, to lack a cognitive path back to the ground from which spring understanding, experience, and nature. As did Novalis and Schlegel in their own ways, Hölderlin holds that the best sense within the sphere of the finite that finite beings can have of being is the product

Romanticism   273 of procedures enacted experientially such that they become principles of subjective synthesis and that, as much as is possible, will “recollect” in experience the felt proximity and distance from the absolute. Hölderlin had been at work on Hyperion on and off for three years prior to his stay in Jena, and it is reasonable to read that work in close connection with the “Urteil und Sein” text. In it, three main aspects of this sort of recollection become apparent. First, although Hölderlin is addressing a problem of self-integration known at least since Herder’s and Schiller’s writings, he does not counsel, as does Schiller at times, hope for a complete, restful harmony of the elements of subjectivity. Instead, the path of experience is a matter of negotiating various sorts of balance of two aspects of experience that will always be in conflict with one another.22 These aspects correspond to and find their source in two ways in which being must impact on subjects. One aspect involves an impetus to immerse oneself in life in order to counter the constitutive effects of being separated from being. Of course one cannot be oneself amidst pure being—being oneself involves individuation, and pure being is ontologically prior to that. But one can still harbor a yearning for finding in everything commonality by reducing objective bearing and “identifying” with all else that has come forth from being. The vehicle for such identification will not be finding conceptual affinities between entities; the requisite identification will take the form of activity an only approximate mimetic process, in which one effaces as much as one can one’s individuality and sinks into the flow of existence. On the other hand, it is also constitutive of my subjectivity that I desire to orient myself in the world as the subject that is me over and against other objects that are radically not-me. The contrast provided by the first-person accusative in the formulation above illustrates the point: I am I, but as an object I am me. This is another form of identification, this time in virtue of my reflective capacity to distance myself from things enough to judge them and, to that extent, to rise above them and be “free.” Hyperion initially feels pulled apart by these two conflicting aspects of experience and attempts to modulate his life, first, in the direction of immersion at the expense of reflection and, then, the other way around. The second aspect of recollection involves just this issue of experience as a process in which the conflicting drives interact. As Hyperion gains more experience he better appreciates the reciprocity of the two constitutive factors and does so in a way that does not paper over that the factors are “opposites”: that they pull in opposing directions. The process of experience works itself out in terms of opposition of mutually dependent elements, and progress is measured in terms of narrowing the obtrusive reaction to the conflict on the part of the subject by coming to understand the constitutive nature of that very conflict. At first, subjects react to their “unity in difference” as alien to what they take to be the nature of their identity. They tend to try to resolve the conflict absolutely. While the conflict is constitutive and cannot be ultimately resolved in achieving perfect unity with oneself or the world, there can be asymptotic approach to such a state. It is very important to be clear about the nature of this “infinite approach.” One should not conceive of it as the approximation to a limit, where there is incremental near-realization of a final end that preempts conflict by reaching forward to a point of unity without conflict. (This is closer to Hegel’s view of the matter.) “Resolution” is perhaps not the best word to use, then, to refer to a subject’s sense of

22 

Especially interesting in this regard is the Hyperion-Fragment (StA III: 182–219).

274   Fred Rush progression through life; conflict persists but the subject’s grasp on its constitutive force has a haunted lucidity, and this brings with it a measure of autonomy, not in freedom from conflict but in freedom to rightly live with it. Third, the effect of this “eccentric path” on the subject is to root her in a ground, the opacity of which she will never overcome and the attitude towards which is one of “thankfulness” (Dank). Hölderlin, again indulging etymological fantasy, drives this verb toward the phonetically similar verb for thinking (denken), in order to show that when thought turns back on itself to ask after its source, thought of that source must take the form of thanks for a source beyond thought’s resources. In later writings Hölderlin mints the neologism Bildsamkeit to chart the idea that subjects are cut out for formation antecedent to their competence to undertake “formation” (Bildung) (StA IV: 156). Hölderlin’s literary work after his period in Jena has fascinated many. For reasons that remain unknown and that may foreshadow Hölderlin’s final mental breakdown in 1806, he suddenly leaves Jena in 1795 to return home to his mother. He took with him drafts of several translation projects, drafts of essays left incomplete that he had promised to Niethammer for publication in the Philosophisches Journal, and several planned and perhaps partly executed translations of ancient Greek poetry. Isolation again set in, allayed only a bit by the occasional meeting with Schelling. Hölderlin moved to Frankfurt am Main in early 1796 to take up a new tutoring position, this time in the household of a wealthy banker. Hölderlin there began a clandestine affair with the banker’s wife, Susette Gontard, who is the model for the character of Diotima in several poems and Hyperion. Hegel joined Hölderlin in Frankfurt a year later, and the reunited pair formed a circle for philosophical discussion that included their mutual friend and correspondent Isaac von Sinclair and Jakob Zwilling, whom they knew as a student in Jena.23 The tenor of the discussions among this new circle can be partly inferred from correspondence and changes in Hegel’s philosophical position away from his youthful Kantianism. The surmise is that Hölderlin’s idea that dialectical thought is to be modeled on his understanding of the structure of love was crucial to his own conception of dialectic (although Hegel’s next phase as amanuensis to Schelling would be equally important in this regard). Hölderlin published the first volume of his novel in April of 1797, sending a copy to Schiller, who relayed it in turn to Goethe, who was fairly unimpressed. Goethe nevertheless met with Hölderlin later that year, counseling him to concentrate on lyric. This Frankfurt period lasted for Hölderlin only two and a half years; by September 1798 he had resigned his post and by 1799 was on his way. Again, the precise catalyst is unknown, although his affair with Gontard was not exactly a secret. He relocated to Homburg, where Sinclair had an important administrative post, and he intermittently met with Gontard. Hölderlin in the meantime had begun work on a tragedy, Empedokles, in 1797, and this and other work centered in antiquity took on a new importance for him (particularly translation from Pindar). The second volume of Hyperion was published in October of 1799, but that success was more than offset by Hölderlin’s failure to receive donations toward a new journal he wished to found, Iduna, from his former supporters Schiller and Goethe and his friend Schelling. He was forced by his finances to take on private tutoring

23 See Jakob Zwillings Nachlass, ed. D. Henrich & C. Jamme, in Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 28 [1986] for a consideration of Zwilling’s significance.

Romanticism   275 again, first in Switzerland and then in Bordeaux. The move to France in 1802, a journey he made on foot, is considered by many scholars to be the point of no return for Hölderlin. Hölderlin felt the move from German-speaking lands to France to be deracinating, one thrust on him by yet another round of asking for support from his former mentors and friends with no response. In his important correspondence with C. U. Böhlendorff he writes of being emptied out and useless in Germany.24 He remained in Bordeaux for a mere three months, returning, again on foot, to Stuttgart very ill. He learnt of Susette Gontard’s death later that year, and it broke him. He returned to his family home and was put in the care of a doctor. He continued work on both his poetry and his poetic theory throughout this period. Hölderlin was never to regain what fragile mental stability he once enjoyed. During the years 1802–5, he wrote many of the poems that have come under philosophical scrutiny, for example, “Patmos” (1802/3), “Remembrance” (1803–5?), “The Ister” (1803–5?). There are also several drafts and fragments of other lyrics from this period.25 He also published translations of Oedipus and Antigone (both 1804). The final straw perhaps was that he and his friend Sinclair were arrested as possible co-conspirators in a plot to assassinate the Elector of Württemburg, which strained their relationship. Sinclair was exonerated; Hölderlin was judged mentally incompetent to stand trial. Some have speculated that Hölderlin accentuated his mental illness for purposes of avoiding conviction. Be that as it may, it is not unknown that the stress of doing so would in fact increase the severity of the illness. And so it did. Hölderlin was relocated to a psychiatric clinic in the university town from which he had begun his intellectual journey, Tübingen, where he was treated for upwards of a year in the clinic of the physician J. H. F. Autenrieth. Autenrieth was a follower of the new, “American” humanitarian reforms in treating mental illness instituted by Benjamin Rush, whose book on the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793 he had translated into German. As it turned out the treatment was not so very humanitarian, involving the administration of belladonna and the use of iron masks, and was judged in the end “unsuccessful.” Hölderlin was then released into the care of a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer and lived in the “tower” of the Zimmer family house for 36 years, dying in 1843. I have gone on a bit about Hölderlin’s life as a background for explicating the philosophical significance of his poetry not because the biographical detail helps to understand the meaning of the poems (although that is no doubt true) but because the philosophical principles instantiated by the poems have to do with the concept of a “course” of a life. It is not possible here to give a detailed interpretation of any one of the hymns (a term Hölderlin did not use to characterize these poems, but one that has become commonplace in the secondary literature on them), let alone several. I wish, however, to forward a schema according to which some of the complexity of one poem may be hinted at in terms of one central concept. The poem in question is “Remembrance” (“Andenken”) and the concept in question is that of the title (StA II: 188–9). “Remembrance” or “recollection” is a concept that charts the dialectical structure drawn from “Urteil und Sein” in temporal terms. “Andenken” 24  Some of the sentiment may be political. Hölderlin remained a supporter of what he took to be the ideals of the French Revolution, but intervening events involving the presence of French troops on German land had soured him. Unlike Hegel, Hölderlin thought Napoléon I a thug. 25  “Der Rhein,” which has also received a great deal of philosophical attention, was composed in 1801.

276   Fred Rush is one of Hölderlin’s river hymns; others are “Der Ister,” “Der Nekar,” and “Der Rhein.” These poems conceive of their rivers as manifestations of the general process of human life under conditions of high self-awareness. Courses of rivers develop through geological time incrementally, influenced by various other physical processes that are themselves in a process of interactive change. The course that a river takes over time as a physical matter is unscripted. The rivers in question in the hymns are great European rivers that have, from antiquity onwards, provided transportation and sustenance for the development of human culture. Hölderlin presses the idea that, when thinking of the river as a whole as a source for life and a force for directing life along its course, one must if one thinks deeply enough consider the beginning of the river in its source and the end of the river in its outflowing into a greater body of water as mutually reinforcing. The same is true for the river as a source for life at the stations along its path; its farms, fortresses, towns, and cities provide homes out of which the inhabitants travel out into the greater world and, in some cases, back again. “Andenken” involves the confluence of two rivers. The Garonne has its source to the south in the Pyrenees, flows by Toulouse and on to Bordeaux, after which it joins with the Dordogne to form the Gironne estuary, which in turn empties out into the sea. The Dordogne has its source to the east in the Auvergne. Bordeaux has been France’s great port on the Atlantic for over three centuries and had that status at the time of Hölderlin’s short stay there. Hölderlin composed the poem after his return to German-speaking lands. So, the poem is a form of remembrance and takes as its subject matter particular actions of mariners going out from Bordeaux to “India” and other, to Hölderlin, “exotic” ports and returning to their homes, if they do. They also “remember” their homes in Bordeaux as their sources and the river as both the source of that home and their path away from it. In Hölderlin’s case, he is remembering all of this from his return to home, that is, what was to become Germany, and his distant port of call was in fact Bordeaux, which it may be recalled was the end of an arduous and impecunious trek on foot. And all of this is to be understood as anchored in the master trope of the river as a reciprocal combination of source and mouth. The image of a river as a combine of mutually influencing beginnings and endings is a product of the poetic rendering of a river as a narrative of a life or lives, and that forms the background for understanding the nature of remembrance. An Andenken is both a memory and an object that evokes memory, a souvenir. Hölderlin’s main project in this poem, and others as well, is to put into poetic practice an action of memory—to instantiate the action rather than declare or describe it—that has a retrospective synthetic power of making the past present as the past it was. To “remember” in this sense (Hölderlin also uses the words “Gedächtnis” and “Erinnerung” at times to refer to the action) is to register within a narrative synthesis the path from (1) a “home” source out to (2) a “foreign” element from which one gains differentiation from the source and can understand it better by contrast as the source that it is, and (3) a return to the source, where the source is changed for one, while still retaining its status as source, by having gone away from it. It is crucial that memory is operative in each stage. In (1) one remembers in a rather immediate way, due to the fact that no contrast with home is yet achieved. In (2) the strangeness of what is foreign is contrasted with the memory of home, but that very strangeness recedes a bit to allow the contrast to refine the memory of home, not merely honing a coarse material that is stable through the process, but by moving memory itself along a narrative continuum that now includes home-understood-by-what-is-not-home. But what-is-not-home is also changed

Romanticism   277 in the process. The homecoming is thus not a return to a place that is preserved from change relative to the understanding of she who comes home; it is a changed place but, in its change, still home enough, perhaps even more understood as home, for the homecoming. For the sailors leaving the Bordeaux harbor, the sea is the foreign element. Hölderlin’s extreme care to include detailed images of and references to the environs of Bordeaux operate in two complementary ways then. On the one hand, he invokes the home of the sailors, their intimate knowledge of it, and its richness as the source of life that they both start out with and, changed, come back to. On the other hand, as his, Hölderlin’s, foreign element the detail functions to root the foreign element in concrete life. What is foreign is not just a neutral prop for remembrance for Hölderlin; the force within remembrance of what is not-home lies in the real experience of it by the agent who is remembering. So, the lyric detail charts, among other things, the overlap between the remembrance of the sailors and Hölderlin’s own, where what is home for one is not-home for the other. Of course, matters are not even that simple, since Hölderlin’s act of remembering and the poem’s status as a souvenir include both structures in overlap. The ambiance of these poems is like that of a cavernous reverberation chamber of memory. The temporal quality of such memory is that what is remembered is remembered as leading up to one—the quality of the past is tempered by its role in the whole of the narrative (i.e. by its being-remembered in this way). Thus memory is not just plucked out of the past and the past presented to one as the past perfect; it is rather that the past is structured as past by its recall. In fact, both the Garonne and the Dordogne are subject to tidal bores in which waves travel cyclically upriver against the current. Had Hölderlin known this, it would have no doubt suggested to him a ready physical echo of the sort of memory he holds is the main structure of self-understanding. Dilthey’s Das Erleben und die Dichtung (1905) inaugurated systematic philosophical interest in Hölderlin. Over the past century, there have been three main camps of Hölderlin reception:  “phenomenological” (Heidegger), “classical” (Dieter Henrich), and “social-psychological” (Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin). Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin have installed themselves as formidable objects of both great admiration and heated dispute. The basic precepts of his own thought as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s dictate Heidegger’s interpretative approach. In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935), Heidegger presents a complex, idiosyncratic account of the role of art in truth,26 and he understands Hölderlin’s poetry to anticipate important parts of that account. Hölderlin’s verse displays truth in its nascent form, that is, at the point at which world and language first diverge. Heidegger holds that an appreciation of this primordial form of truth is especially evident in the language of pre-classical Greek poetry, the descriptive character of which is suffused with a pre-descriptive reverence for the inherent nature of things. This accounts for both Heidegger’s concentration on Hölderlin’s great hymns and his contention, with Nietzsche and Norbert von Hellingrath,27 that the 26  Gesamtausgabe, ed. F.W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1976ff.) 5: 1–72; see also Sein und Zeit, 16th rev. ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), § 44. 27 See Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung I, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Colli, G. & Montinari, M. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–77), I: 171–2; see also Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung II, in Kritische Studienausgabe, I: 300. Hellingrath founded the first reasonably comprehensive edition of Hölderlin’s work in 1913 and was especially preoccupied with Hölderlin’s translations/adaptations of Pindar into German.

278   Fred Rush most important aspect of Hölderlin’s thought is his conception of the relation of German to Greek poetry.28 The structuring hymn for Heidegger—the one he deploys as a lens through which to view the others—is “Der Ister”;29 even in his treatments of other major poems, the idea Heidegger finds in “Der Ister,” that is, that “being” is a process of continual renewal issuing from an ever receding source, is pervasive.30 For Heidegger the importance of Hölderlin relative to German idealism consists in offering an alternative to its overly subjective and modern character. He was not moved to reconsider this view even after the appearance of “Urteil und Sein” in 1962. By contrast Henrich’s “classical” interpretation takes “Andenken” as the main poem in terms of which the rest of the work unfolds.31 Here “Urteil und Sein” provides the crucial background, allowing the reader to track systematic philosophical principles at work in the poetry. Henrich holds that Hölderlin presents universal truths in a particularly “active” form, that is, as embedded in the particularity of life, and reflected upon in memory as so embedded, in ways that can reform and deepen the subjectivity of the reader. In effect “remembrance” forms the basis for a systematic reworking within the idealist tradition of a conception of dialectic that is allegedly superior to Hegel’s. Henrich does not deny the pertinence of Greek thought to Hölderlin, but emphasis is placed firmly on the specifically German context of his writings.32 The “social-psychological” branch of Hölderlin interpretation has its main representative in Adorno. For Adorno, Hölderlin’s significance lies in the hymns seen in light of the late poetic fragments. Hölderlin is for Adorno a high modern thinker avant la lettre, whose most important contribution is his “paratactic” mode of discourse.33 Hölderlin’s poetry is a particularly resonant instance of how alienation due to crushing social, economic, and political conformity heightens subjectivity to the breaking point of near incommunicability. Hölderlin’s lyrics express “reconciliation” (Versöhnung) to being marginalized in a world that is developing by attempting to eliminate individuality; however, the reconciliation in question is not at all triumphantly Hegelian; it is, rather, steeped in suffering, that is, reconciliation to being a sufferer equipped with only a bare, open-ended hope that one is able to keep alive something relatively untouched by instrumental reason.34 28 See Gesamtausgabe 4: 90 n.

29 See Gesamtausgabe 53: 60f., 74f., 122f. (especially the discussion of “τὸ δεινόν” and its connection

with “das Unheimliche”). Heidegger must have read and been impressed by Friedrich Beißner’s Hölderlins Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen (Stuttgart: Mohr, 1933). See also “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung” (1936/7) Gesamtausgabe 4: 33–48, which is dedicated to Hellingrath. 30  See “Andenken,” in Gesamtausgabe, 52: 59ff. and 4: 79–151. 31  See especially Henrich’s Der Gang des Andenkens. Beobachtungen und Gedanken zu Hölderlins Gedicht (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986) and his Der Grund im Bewußtsein. Henrich’s interpretation is aimed expressly at dislodging Heidegger’s approach to the hymns, a project carried out mostly in lengthy footnotes to the text. See Der Gang des Andenkens, pp. 188–9 n.8, 190–1 n.12, 200–4 nn.35–6, 204–5 n.44. Henrich is also critical of Adorno on some fronts, but joins him in disputing Heidegger’s interpretation. See Der Gang des Andenkens, pp. 234–5 n.141. 32 See Der Gang des Andenkens, pp. 12–13. 33  “Parataxis. Zur späten Lyriks Hölderlins,” in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1965), pp. 156–209. 34  Cf. the treatment in Benjamin’s “Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin. ‘Dichtermut’ und ‘Blödigkeit’,” in Gesammelte Schriften II.1: 105–26. Lukács’ Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern: Franke, 1947) accentuates even more Hölderlin’s material alienation.

Romanticism   279 Hölderlin is a screen upon which philosophers have cast images from their own magic lanterns. Each of the outlined approaches to Hölderlin’s work has pros and cons. It is difficult not to view the background commitment to Heideggerian ontology as substantively burdensome and procedurally ex ante. That said it is also hard not to admire the painstaking attention to the poetic language and sheer philosophical ambition of the reading. The classical treatment is the antipode of Heidegger’s; countering the anti-subjective cast of that approach with the figure of Hölderlin as the poet of idealist subjectivity. Here scrupulous attention is paid to historical materials in reconstructing the literary and philosophical context for the work, and that is an advantage. The classical approach also excels at the details of the verse. But, again, dependency on background undermines somewhat the rather large philosophical claims made on behalf of Hölderlin. The problem here is not taking on board too much exogenous matter, as is the case with the phenomenological interpretation. It is, rather, that too little background—really a very slim portfolio of philosophical writing—is made to support too much. Finally, the social-psychological reading, according to which Hölderlin forwards a more advanced account of subjectivity than that on offer in German idealism, achieves what theoretical heft it enjoys at some remove from discussion of the actual poetry.35

13.5 Summation German romanticism is a vibrant but often overlooked set of philosophical alternatives or additives to idealism. The barriers to entry into its conceptual domain are severe, however. One must be conversant with the systematic idealism of its day, as well as with German counter-Enlightenment thought, literary history and practice, and the developing disciplines of anthropology, historical linguistics, and hermeneutics. Moreover, once one steps over its threshold it is difficult not to try to understand it in terms of what is more familiar, in particular in terms of idealism. This can have the distorting effect of viewing Novalis’ thought as superior to that of Schlegel, as I argued before. But it also has ramifications for comparisons between the Jena writers and Hölderlin. One sometimes sees Hölderlin proffered as a more “radical” thinker on the basis that his view of the absolute is more ontologically basic. This opinion is based in the observation that Novalis and Schlegel’s conception of absolute pertains to the ground for subjectivity (i.e. within subjects) while Hölderlin’s conception involves the broader idea of the ground for all things, full stop. The idea seems to be that the extent to which Novalis’s and Schlegel’s absolute could claim the broader scope would have to do with a “constitution” claim that makes the world depend on subjects, something Hölderlin plainly rejects. In a way, it might be argued, the Jena writers retain a (radicalized) Kantian/Fichtean bearing, while Hölderlin divests himself of such a bearing altogether. Viewing matters in this way is understandable, but it is also debatable. The fact of the matter is that all of the romantics, Hölderlin

35 

Peter Szondi, Hölderlin-Studien. Mit einem Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1967) is an extraordinarily insightful treatment that avoids many of the difficulties discussed in this section.

280   Fred Rush included, view the absolute in terms of its subjective effects, which effects are constitutive of subjectivity and objectivity. None of them hold the absolute itself to be subjective (or, for that matter, objective). It is especially Schlegel’s ironizing that can seem overly subjective, since the workings of irony have as their result imaginative projections meant to drive home the identification with/distance from the absolute dichotomy for the benefit of subjects (and communities of them). There is not much consideration of non-human nature in Schlegel to be sure (more is in Novalis, especially in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen), but that hardly entails disregard of it in principle. So, functionally speaking, there is a difference of emphasis but not in kind to my mind between the “subjective” and the more “ontological” romantics. What is more telling of their differences are the existential dimensions of the protocols they urge as constitutive of subjectivity “lived to the full”: inversion, irony, and recollection.

Bibliography Primary Works in Standard Editions Diez, Immanuel Carl (1997). Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften, ed. D. Henrich. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1962–). Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth, H. Jacobs & H. Gliwitzky. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog [=GA]. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1976). David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch. Breslau:  Loewe, repr. Darmstadt:  Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (2000). Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Breslau: Loewe, repr. Hamburg: Meiner. Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) (1960–). Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhorn and R. Samuel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer [=NS / FS=Fichte-Studien]. Hegel, G.W.F. (1971). Werke, ed. E. Moldenhauer & K. M. Michel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp [=HW]. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1943–85). Sämtliche Werke, ed. F. Beißner. Stuttgart [=StA]. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1789). Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens. Prague. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1789–92). Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie. 2 vols. Leipzig. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1790–4). Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen. Jena. Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1791). Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens. Jena. Schlegel, Friedrich (1958–). Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler. Paderborn: Schöningh [=KFSA]. Solger, Karl W. F. (1829). Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, ed. K. W. L. Heyse. Leipzig.

Commentary and Secondary Literature Adorno, Theodor (1965). “Parataxis. Zur späten Lyriks Hölderlins,” in Noten zur Literatur III. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, pp. 156–209.

Romanticism   281 Ameriks, Karl (2000). Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Behler, Ernst (1993). German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Beiser, Frederick (1987). The Fate of Reason:  German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beißner, Friedrich (1961). Hölderlins Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen. Stuttgart: Metzler [original published in 1933]. Benjamin, Walter (1977–) Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann & H. Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Frank, Manfred (1997). “Unendliche Annäherung.” Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin (1986). Sein und Zeit, 16th rev. ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin (1976–). Gesamtausgabe, ed. F.W.  von Herrmann. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, in Gesamtausgabe 4. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” in Gesamtausgabe 39. Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” in Gesamtausgabe 52. Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” in Gesamtausgabe 53. Henrich, Dieter (2004). Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790–1794. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Henrich, Dieter (1992). Der Grund im Bewußtsein. Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Henrich, Dieter (1986). Der Gang des Andenkens. Beobachtungen und Gedanken zu Hölderlins Gedicht. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Henrich, Dieter (1966). “Hölderlin über Urteil und Sein,” in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch [1966]: 73–96. Henrich, Dieter & Jamme, Christoph (eds.) (1986). Jakob Zwillings Nachlass. Hegel-Studien. Beiheft 28. Bonn: Bouvier. Lovejoy, Arthur (1948). “The Meaning of ‘Romantic’ in Early German Romanticism,” in: Essays in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 183–206. Lukács, Georg (1947). Goethe und seine Zeit. Bern: Francke. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1980). Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rush, Fred (2006). “Irony and Romantic Subjectivity,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. N. Kompridis. London: Routledge, pp. 173–95. Rush, Fred (2003). “Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology”, in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. B. Hanssen and A. Benjamin. London & New  York: Continuum, pp. 123–46. Rush, Fred (2001). “Kant and Schlegel,” in Akten des 9. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. V. Gerhardt, R.-P. Horstmann and R. Schumacher. Berlin: de Gruyter, III: 618–25. Szondi, Peter (1967). Hölderlin-Studien. Mit einem Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis. Frankfurt/M: Surkamp. Wellbery, David (1996). The Specular Moment:  Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 14

N eo -K a n ti a n ism Frederick Beiser 14.1  Topography and Chronology Simply defined, neo-Kantianism, in an historical sense, was the movement in nineteenth-century Germany to rehabilitate Kant’s philosophy. It was the predominant philosophical movement there in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and its influence soon spread far and wide, to Italy, France, England, and the US. The golden age of neo-Kantianism was from 1860 to 1910. During these decades, to be at the cutting edge of philosophy, to have a rigorous training, meant studying Kant. In 1875, Johannes Volkelt, an up-and-coming neo-Kantian, gave witness to this new Zeitgeist:  ‘With few negligible exceptions, all philosophers agree in the high estimation of Kant; all attempt to orient themselves around Kant, and all see in his philosophy more or less explicit indications of their own position.’1 Some hard statistical facts confirm this Kantian hegemony.2 From 1862 to 1881 the number of lecture courses on Kant trebled, and there were more lectures on Kant than all modern philosophers combined. Bibliographies show that, after 1860, the number of works on Kant increased geometrically every year. And, by 1870, every major German university had at least one neo-Kantian professor on its philosophy faculty. Because of these facts, Klaus Christian Köhnke, doyen of neo-Kantian scholars, has called these decades ‘the neo-Kantian period of German university philosophy’.3 Customarily, neo-Kantianism is divided into three main schools or groups: the Marburg school, whose chief protagonists were Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Paul Natorp (1854– 1924), and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945); the Southwestern, Baden, or Heidelberg school, whose major representatives were Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), and Emil Lask (1875–1915); and the neo-Friesian school in Göttingen under the leadership of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927).4 The dominant neo-Kantian universities were 1  Johannes Volkelt, Kant’s Kategorischer Imperativ und die Gegenwart (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Lesevereins der deutschen Studenten Wien’s, 1875), 5. 2  These facts are taken from Klaus Christian Köhnke’s seminal study, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 314–17, 381–5. 3 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus,  385. 4  On the Marburg school, see Ulrich Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994). Unfortunately, there is no counterpart history

Neo-Kantianism   283 Marburg, Göttingen, Strassburg, and Heidelberg; Berlin too eventually became a centre of neo-Kantianism later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), Alois Riehl (1844–1924), and Benno Erdmann (1851–1921) held chairs there.5 It is necessary to emphasize that these three schools do not define or exhaust neo-Kantianism. If one read every article and book of every member of all these groups, one would still be far from a full knowledge of the movement. These groups came into being relatively late, between 1880 and 1904, decades after the core of the movement had been formed. All the founding figures of neo-Kantianism preceded them. But even later neo-Kantians fell outside their orbits. Among these ‘outsiders’ were the Berliners Riehl, Paulsen, and Erdmann, but also Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), Erich Adickes (1866–1928), Arthur Liebert (1878–1946), Emil Arnoldt (1828–1905), and last, but certainly not least, Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94). We too easily ignore these thinkers, some of whom played a crucial role in the movement, if we think of neo-Kantianism strictly in terms of schools. The crucial formative decade for neo-Kantianism was the 1860s. Although there had been several neo-Kantian manifestos in earlier decades,6 it was in the 1860s that they grew in number and coalesced into a single force. It was in this decade that some of the most dynamic young philosophers in Germany wrote articles, essays, and even whole books, championing the cause of Kant’s philosophy. We can trace the famous slogan ‘Zurück zu Kant!’ back to the 1860s,7 though historical accuracy tells us that it never occurred in just this form, and that there were several earlier versions of it. There were five major figures who re-established Kant in the 1860s: Kuno Fischer (1824– 1907), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829– 97), and Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75). All published their chief writings on Kant in the 1860s, so that, despite their different ages, they still belong to the same period. Several themes unite these authors. All saw Kant as a bulwark against materialism; all made for the Southwestern school. On the neo-Friesian school, see Arthur Kronfeld, ‘Geleitworte zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der neuen Friesischen Schule’ in Das Wesen der psychiatrischen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Springer, 1920), 46–65; and Erna Blencke, ‘Zur Geschichte der neuen Fries’schen Schule und der Jakob Friedrich Fries-Gesellschaft’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978), 199–208. Though neglected by standard histories, the group surrounding Nelson was especially eminent. Among its members were the theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941), and the Nobel prize winner Otto Meyerhoff (1884–1951). The group published their own journal, Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule, Neue Folge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1907–37), 6 vols. Histories of the Southwestern and neo-Friesian are desiderata of future research. 5 

On neo-Kantianism in Berlin, see Volkert Gerhardt, Reinhard Mehring, and Jana Rindert, Berliner Geist. Eine Geschichte der Berliner Universitätsphilosophie bis 1946 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 179–93. 6  Among these earlier manifestos were Friedrich Beneke, Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit (Berlin: Mittler, 1832); Christian Hermann Weiße, In welchem Sinn die deutsche Philosophie jetzt wieder an Kant sich zu orientiren hat (Leipzig: Dyk, 1847); and Carl Fortlage, ‘Die Stellung Kants zur Philosophie vor ihm und nach ihm’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft IV (1838), 91–123. 7  The slogan has been attributed to Otto Liebmann’s Kant und die Epigonen (Stuttgart: Schober, 1865). Liebmann concluded several chapters with the declaration ‘Also muß auf Kant zurückgegangen werden.’ He never used the more brief and punchy slogan.

284   Frederick Beiser criticism the vocation of philosophy; all advanced a psychological interpretation of Kant; and all repudiated the methods of speculative idealism. The origins of neo-Kantianism go back to the end of the eighteenth century, even before Kant’s death (1804).8 The founding fathers of the movement were Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), and Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798– 1854). All defined themselves as Kantians, and all called for a return to the spirit of Kant’s teachings. They anticipated, and laid down the foundation for, defining doctrines of later neo-Kantianism: the importance of the Kantian dualisms between essence and existence, understanding and sensibility; the limitation of all knowledge to experience; the leading role of a critical and analytical method in philosophy; and the need for philosophy to follow rather than lead the natural sciences. The crucial role of Fries, Herbart, and Beneke in founding neo-Kantianism, though ignored in recent neo-Kantian scholarship,9 cannot be underestimated, especially in view of the enduring and widespread influence of Fries and Herbart. There is a popular image of the neo-Kantians as epigoni, as faithful disciples who would have to go without truth for a week if the mail coach from Königsberg broke down.10 Nothing could be further from the truth. Though all neo-Kantians were intent, in one way or another, on the rehabilitation of Kant’s philosophy, none were strict disciples of Kant. All were severely critical of Kant, and all used him for their own ends. Often they would appeal to a distinction between the spirit and letter of Kant’s philosophy; but the spirit ‘blew where it listeth’, taking on all shapes and forms depending on the philosopher. There was indeed a period of Kant philology at the turn of the century, in the scholarship of Benno Erdmann, Erich Adickes, and Emil Arnoldt, who were devoted to strict readings and editions of texts. This scholarship, however, was more a by-product of the movement than an integral philosophical component; and, in any case, no one tried to pass off scholarship as a replacement for philosophy. Another serious misconception about neo-Kantianism is that it was a form of foundationalism whose central goal was to find the grounds for knowledge in the empirical sciences.11 From its very beginnings neo-Kantianism arose out of the rejection of foundationalism, more specifically, the attempt by the idealist tradition of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel to provide a systematic foundation for all knowledge and the empirical sciences. The neo-Kantians insisted that the positive sciences were autonomous, and that they needed no foundation from philosophy. The main task of the neo-Kantian philosophy was indeed to determine ‘the logic of the sciences’, though this logic was held to be already implicit in the methods of the empirical sciences themselves. The neo-Kantian 8 

The reaction against speculative idealism began in the late 1790s. In the Winter of 1796 the young Fries retired into his garret and sketched his programme for a revision of Kant’s philosophy. In the same year Herbart wrote several short essays critical of Schelling. 9  None of these figures are treated by Hans-Ludwig Ollig, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979); Thomas Willey, Back to Kant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978); L. W. Beck, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967); and H. Holzhey, ‘Neukantianismus’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1984), VI, 747–54. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, treats Beneke but neither Fries nor Herbart. 10  As Friedrich Schlegel once said. See his ‘Fragmente’, Athenaeum I (1798), 202. 11  This conception of neo-Kantianism has been popularized by Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 4, 131–2.

Neo-Kantianism   285 philosopher laid down no rules of his own; he simply made explicit the rules already implicit in scientific practice. It should be obvious that in a chapter so short, and in a movement so rich and vast, I cannot begin to summarize the whole of neo-Kantianism. So I will have nothing to say about some of its most important achievements, viz., the philosophy of value of the Southwestern school, the philosophy of science of the Marburg school, the philosophy of culture of Ernst Cassirer. Instead, I will devote myself to one central and defining theme: the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy. And I will try to explain why neo-Kantianism arose and why it disappeared. Throughout, the main problem will be to reconstruct neo-Kantianism from within, making it seem like a rational position within its historical context.

14.2  Reaction against Speculation The original motivating force behind neo-Kantianism was the reaction against the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This reaction began with Fries, Herbart, and Beneke in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were critical of speculative idealism chiefly on methodological grounds. The methods of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel seemed to them a serious violation of Kant’s critical teachings, a relapse into dogmatic pre-Kantian rationalism. The source of Fichte’s and Schelling’s rationalism lay in the methodological writings of Karl Leonhard Reinhold,12 who had advocated a foundationalist programme for philosophy in the early 1790s. To establish itself as a secure science, Reinhold taught, philosophy should begin with a single self-evident first principle, and from it derive all its results through rigorous deduction. Only by this means, he believed, could philosophy avoid scepticism and create a system organized around a single idea. Fries, Herbart, and Beneke saw this method as unworkable and unreliable.13 They fired a salvo of objections against it: that it does not show how we acquire the first principle; that no single first principle on its own can have significant consequences (because a syllogism requires at least two premises); that no abstract and general first principles can derive concrete and particular results; that it imposes a priori constructions and schemata upon experience. As an antidote to this ‘speculative method’, they advocated an empirical method modelled on Kant’s Prize Essay.14 Philosophy should imitate the positive sciences: it should follow an ‘analytic’ method, which begins with the particular and then ascends to the more universal; the first principles of philosophy should be the result, not starting point, of investigation. Fries, Herbart, and Beneke never renounced the value of a

12 

See above all K. L. Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen (Jena: Widtmann und Mauke, 1790–4) and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (Jena: Widtmann und Mauke, 1791). 13  See Fries, Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling (Leipzig; Reinicke, 1803); Herbart, Ueber philosophisches Studium (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1807); and Beneke, Die Philosophie in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Erfahrung, zur Spekulation und zum Leben (Berlin: Mittler, 1833). 14  The first book of Kant Fries read was the Prize Essay. After that he immediately read Reinhold. The contrast was evident and from there came Fries’ methodological ideas. See Ernst Henke, Jakob Friedrich Fries: Aus seinem handschriftlichen Nachlasse dargestellt (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867), 26.

286   Frederick Beiser ‘synthetic’ method that begins with the universal and descends to the particular; but they insisted that it should follow the analytic method, that the first principle should be formulated only after collecting facts from experience. While the synthetic method is fine for exposition, the analytic is necessary for discovery. In beginning with the synthetic method, Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling were leaving their first principle too much to chance, to lucky ‘intellectual intuitions’, which often proved fanciful and arbitrary. The reaction against the methods of speculative idealism became a defining motif of neo-Kantianism. In the 1850s Hermann Helmholtz announced his own programme for a return to Kant, one very close to that advocated by Fries, Herbart, and Beneke decades earlier.15 He too rejected the speculative method, and he too insisted that philosophy follow the method of the empirical sciences. A close relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences had been the hallmark of Kant’s philosophy, Helmholtz maintained, and it had broken down in the age of speculative idealism; it was only by fostering that relationship again that philosophy could achieve reliable and lasting results. In the 1860s Fischer, Zeller, Meyer, Liebmann, and Lange, following Helmholtz’s example, championed a similar programme. By the 1870s and 1880s the reaction against speculative idealism had become so engrained and enshrined in neo-Kantianism that it was regarded as a virtually self-evident axiom.16 By then the spirit of speculative idealism had been safely laid to rest in its grave. The reaction against speculation was crucial to neo-Kantian identity, so much so that it is the source of the ‘neo’ in ‘neo-Kantianism’. Neo-Kantianism could be ‘neo’ only if it followed a period when Kant’s fortunes were in decline. That decline came with the era of speculative idealism, the decades from 1800 to 1830, when Kant seemed to be surpassed, a mere footstool for the heights climbed through speculation. While it is natural to assume that the reaction came at the end of the idealist era, sometime after Hegel’s death, it in fact came much earlier, at the very beginning of that era. Fries and Herbart had attacked Fichte and Schelling in unpublished fragments in the 1790s, and published their ideas by the 1800s. The term ‘neo-Kantian’ is an anachronism, an historian’s device. It is important to see, however, that to whom one applies it is a matter of controversy. Since Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel also claimed to be the true heirs of Kant, they too could be described as ‘neo-Kantian’, reacting against the distortion of the Kantian legacy by Fries, Herbart, and Beneke. They too claimed to think in the spirit of Kant, and they too cited many texts in their behalf. After all, was it not Kant who had claimed to follow a synthetic method in the first Kritik, who had stressed the importance of systematic unity, who had praised the dogmatic method, and who had insisted that the first principles of a science are a priori? While Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel admitted to having gone beyond Kant’s regulative strictures in giving constitutive status to the idea of an organism, they insisted that they did so only for the sake of the critical philosophy itself. It was only by giving that idea constitutive 15 

See Hermann Helmholtz, Über das Sehen des Menschen. Ein populär wissenschaftlicher Vortrag gehalten zu Königsberg in Preussen. Zum Besten von Kant’s Denkmal. Am 27. Februar 1855 (Leipzig: Voss, 1855). 16  Thus in 1878 Carl Schaarschmidt wrote of the weaknesses of Reinhold’s methodology as ‘bekannte Dinge’. See his ‘Vom rechten und vom falschen Kriticismus’, Philosophische Monatshefte 14 (1878), 1–12, 1.

Neo-Kantianism   287 status, they argued, that they could overcome the dualisms preventing the solution of the problem of knowledge. Hence they saw themselves as more effective transcendental philosophers than those who insisted on upholding Kant’s dualisms. Clearly, Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Hegel’s dispute with Fries, Herbart, and Beneke played off the two sides of Kant against one another. The former party stressed his rational side, the latter his empirical side. Who, then, were the real neo-Kantians? Both, because each had one side of Kant; or neither, because Kant’s system was meant to be a synthesis of both sides? Fortunately, we do not have to decide this dispute. History has done so for us, for better or worse. It has awarded the term to the progeny of Fries, Herbart, and Beneke. We should be aware, though, that whenever we use the term ‘neo-Kantian’ we are begging questions in an old dispute. As Kuno Fischer pointed out long ago,17 there were two Kantian traditions in Jena, and never were they at peace.

14.3  Crisis and Controversy Although the reaction against speculative idealism was a defining event for neo-Kantianism, it was not a sufficient cause of its generation. Rejection of the methods of speculative idealism appears in other intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, viz., materialism and positivism, and is not unique to neo-Kantianism. The reasons for the emergence of neo-Kantianism specifically appear only in its responses to two cultural crises of the mid-nineteenth century. One of these was the so-called identity or obsolescence crisis of philosophy, which began in the 1840s after the decline of speculative idealism. At stake in the identity crisis was the very survival or existence of philosophy itself; hence Germans would sometimes call it ‘die Existenzfrage’. After the collapse of speculative idealism, philosophy seemed to have nothing to do and nowhere to go. No one believed anymore that philosophy could give knowledge of the absolute, or that it could give a priori knowledge of nature as a whole. The positive sciences had carved up the world among themselves, and there seemed nothing left for philosophy. Since the sciences had become successful on their own, they had no need for a philosophical foundation. As Jürgen Bona Meyer summed up the plight of philosophy: Philosophy as a science seems a thing of the past; its solvable problems have become the province of particular sciences. The daughters of a common mother now demand independence and do not want to be inspected or corrected; they prefer that their old and moody mother just laid down to rest in her grave.18

In the early 1860s two neo-Kantians, Kuno Fischer and Eduard Zeller, came forward with an effective strategy for resolving this crisis.19 They had a very clear conception of 17 

Kuno Fischer, Die beiden kantischen Schulen in Jena (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862). Jürgen Bona Meyer, Philosophische Zeitfragen (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1870), 1. 19  See Kuno Fischer, Kant’s Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre (Mannheim: Friedrich Bassermann, 1860), 89–115; and Eduard Zeller, Ueber Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie (Heidelberg: Groos, 1861). 18 

288   Frederick Beiser philosophy that not only distinguished it from the positive sciences, but that also avoided the problems of metaphysics. According to their conception, philosophy should be first and foremost epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie), and indeed a special kind of epistemology, namely, the critical examination of the logic of the sciences. As such, philosophy was a second-order discipline whose special task was to investigate the methods and principles of the sciences. The particular sciences were all first-order disciplines, whose business was to explain the world itself, not the methods and principles by which we explain it. They used these methods and principles but never made them the object of investigation. That was the specific task of philosophy. In formulating this conception of philosophy, Fischer and Zeller made no claim to originality; and they were happy to acknowledge the source of their inspiration: Immanuel Kant. It was Kant’s conception of philosophy as criticism, as transcendental enquiry into the necessary conditions of scientific knowledge, that showed the way out of the crisis. What better proof was needed, then, for the old sage’s continuing relevance and vitality? The other crisis was the materialism controversy, a dispute of the greatest importance for German intellectual history in the nineteenth century. The problem it raised was a defining issue for every philosophical party. The controversy began in September 1854 when Rudolph Wagner, the head of the Physiological Institute in Göttingen, gave his opening address to the 31st Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte. Wagner’s address raised a very provocative question: is natural science heading toward materialism? It seemed to Wagner, a convinced Christian, that some physiologists had taken their methods too far, because they were now questioning free will, the existence of the soul, and the origins of humanity from a single couple. One of these physiologists, Wagner insinuated, was a haughty young man named Carl Vogt. Indignant that Wagner charged him when he was not present to defend himself, Vogt responded with a blistering polemic, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft.20 Yes, Vogt replied, science was leading to materialism, but that was a good thing. Only superstitious and bigotted Christians would find it bad. The more we investigate nature, Vogt argued, the more we find evidence against the old fashioned beliefs in the existence of the soul and an original couple. The net effect of the heated exchange between Wagner and Vogt was a drastic and dramatic dilemma: either a scientific materialism or an irrational faith in God, freedom, and immortality. This dilemma was reminiscent of that posed some 70 years earlier by F. H. Jacobi, who claimed in his famous dispute with Moses Mendelssohn that the new natural sciences were leading inevitably toward the atheism and fatalism of Spinozism, then the most rigorous form of naturalism. Jacobi confronted his contemporaries with the dilemma: either a naturalistic atheism and fatalism or a salto mortale, a leap of faith in a personal creator and freedom. With no less urgency and bluster, Wagner and Vogt were posing the same dilemma for their generation. Vogt’s spat with Wagner was only the beginning of a much longer and more complex controversy, which would eventually pull every major thinker into its vortex. As it happened, Wagner’s warnings backfired. Rather than frightening the materialists, he provoked them. Out of their closets they came, now marching headstrong, banners waving, in a thick phalanx to challenge the establishment. 1855, the very year Vogt published Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft, also witnessed the appearance of two mighty materialist

20 

Carl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (Gießen: Ricker, 1855).

Neo-Kantianism   289 tomes: Heinrich Czolbe’s Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus and Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff.21 What Vogt had announced in a polemical context—that the natural sciences are heading inevitably toward materialism—Czolbe and Büchner would now defend in a more general and systematic manner. These works laid out the basic principles for a materialist worldview, arguing that it is based on nothing less than the empirical findings of the new natural sciences. Thus Wagner’s worst nightmare had become reality. The sons of Lucretius were now dancing on the streets of Germany. Who had the intellectual might and muscle in those desperate days to push back the materialist phalanx? No one, of course, but Immanuel Kant. For the critical philosophy exposed the utter naivety of the materialists’ chief presupposition: that we have knowledge of a material reality. The materialists failed to learn the first lesson of the critique: that what is given to us in our experience is very much the product of the cognitive activities by which we know it. They were one and all transcendental realists of a naive and dogmatic stripe. No one in the 1860s saw the polemical value of this point with more clarity than Friedrich Albert Lange, who made it a guiding motif of his Geschichte des Materialismus.22 Lange not only exposed the naivety of the materialists’ main assumption, but he also took his argument against them one step further. Taking into account the new physiological researches of Johannes Müller and Helmholtz, he argued that the fundamental thesis of the critical philosophy—that the subject forms the object of its cognition—had been confirmed by the latest experiments. The theory of specific nervous energies advanced by Müller and developed by Helmholtz showed that what we perceive depends on the specific qualities of the nerves by which we perceive them. This argument completely trumped the materialist’s most powerful card, for it showed that the new sciences were not vindicating but undermining materialism. Thus the materialists had been beaten at their own game. It was no less a decisive advantage of the critical philosophy that it could also resolve Vogt’s dilemma. The transcendental idealism that undermined materialism also involved a distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, between the world as we know it through our cognitive activity and the world as it exists in itself. This meant that natural science could be limited to the realm of appearances, and that the ethical realm could be left inviolate. Kant had always intended, of course, to deny knowledge to make room for faith through his transcendental idealism, a strategy that was as relevant in the 1850s as it had been in the 1790s when Reinhold first advanced the Kantian cause.23 Yet there was still a crucial difference between the neo-Kantians’ conception of this strategy and Reinhold’s. Reinhold appealed to Kant’s dualism to defend the beliefs in God, freedom, and immortality, but most neo-Kantians had lost their faith in these old beliefs. What they wanted to uphold was something more open and general, what Lange called ‘the realm of the ideal’, that is, a space for moral and aesthetic norms. These norms, the neo-Kantians believed, were distinct in kind from the laws of the natural world. Thus Lange, Meyer, Cohen, Riehl, Windelband, Rickert, and Lask read the noumenal-phenomenal distinction not as one between kinds of entity but as one between natural laws and norms. The chief problem 21  Louis Büchner, Kraft und Stoff (Frankfurt: Meidinger, 1855); and Heinrich Czolbe, Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus (Leipzig: Costenoble, 1855). 22  Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866). A second edition, twice the size of the original, appeared in two volumes in 1873 and 1875. 23  See K. L. Reinhold, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Leipzig: Göschen, 1790–2).

290   Frederick Beiser of philosophy was no longer to explain the relationship between mysterious entities— whether mind and body, noumena and phenomena—but the relationship between laws and norms, facts and values.24 But, however one reads that Kantian distinction, the main point is that it resolved the dilemma of the materialism controversy. Once again, Kant had proven himself the saviour of German philosophy, the Immanuel to lead it out of the wilderness and into the modern scientific age.

14.4  From Psychology to Logic Although epistemology was central to the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy, there was no unanimity about its goals and methods. For nearly 70 years, from 1800 to 1870, there had been a consensus among neo-Kantians that epistemology should be a form of empirical psychology. This view held that the subject matter of epistemology was the origins and faculties of knowledge, and that its method was observation and experiment. Cognition was understood in psychological terms, as a matter of psychic activities and functions, and not in logical terms, as a matter of the logical structure of propositions. The task of epistemology was to know the causes of mental processes rather than norms that guided them. This view of epistemology, which later became known as ‘psychologism’, was first conceived in the late eighteenth century by Fries and Schmid,25 and then developed in the early 1800s by Herbart and Beneke. Helmholtz took it a step further in the 1850s by conceiving cognition in terms of physiology. The amateurish introspection championed by Fries thus gave way to controlled observation and experiment in the laboratory. Partly due to Helmholtz’s prestige, and partly due to the influence of Fries and Beneke, the psychological tradition continued well into the 1860s. The luminaries of the 1860s—Fischer, Zeller, Liebmann, Lange, and Meyer—had all understood epistemology in psychological and physiological terms. As late as 1870 Meyer wrote a treatise defending Fries and the psychological interpretation of Kant.26 Since Husserl and Frege, ‘psychologism’ has been a dirty word and dismissed as a serious misconception of logic and epistemology. We do well, though, to understand the original rationale for the doctrine. We can understand cognition either as a psychic process or as a logical structure; it all depends on what we want to know. We make fallacies only when we indiscriminately mix these approaches. The motivation of the early neo-Kantians in turning toward psychology was perfectly understandable: they wanted to make epistemology into a science, and so to bring it into line with the empirical sciences. They believed that Kant had failed to make his methods in epistemology conform to his own standards of knowledge; his methods were utterly scholastic—analysis of concepts, definitions, postulating mental faculties—while his standard of knowledge was completely empirical. On 24 

See Heinrich Rickert, ‘Vom Begriff der Philosophie’, Logos I (1910), 1–35. See Carl Schmid, Empirische Psychologie (Jena: Cröker, 1791) and Fries, ‘Propädeutik einer allgemeinen empirischen Psychologie’, ‘Allgemeine Uebersicht der empirischen Erkenntnisse des Gemüths’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 203–67, 354–402. 26  Jürgen Bona Meyer, Kant’s Psychologie (Berlin: Hertz, 1870). 25 

Neo-Kantianism   291 no account were the early psychologists guilty of the simple fallacies later ascribed to them. Fries himself insisted on distinguishing between the discovery and justification of knowledge, and never thought that simply knowing the origins of a proposition was tantamount to its justification.27 Bottom line: the whole Friesian programme needs re-examination. Whether fallacy or not, there was a remarkable shift in the neo-Kantian understanding of epistemology in the early 1870s. Cohen, Windelband, and Riehl began to understand Kant’s transcendental philosophy as more a logical than psychological enterprise. They saw Kant’s central question no longer as the quid facti?—the origins and causes of knowledge—but as the quid juris?—the justification or evidence for propositions. Initially, Cohen, Riehl, and Windelband, as good students of Herbart, continued to mix the psychological with the logical approach; but as the years passed the psychological aspect faded away. By 1876 Riehl was to declare in no uncertain terms: ‘Kant’s critical philosophy knows no psychology.’28 After Cohen’s, Windelband’s, and Riehl’s conversion, the logical understanding of epistemology became the new orthodoxy in neo-Kantianism. The psychological interpretation, after a reign of 70 years, had fully and finally come to rest. This shift from a psychological to a logical understanding of epistemology anticipates the contemporary understanding of Kant and the discipline. Windelband went on to elaborate his new logical conception through the concept of ‘normativity’, a concept fashionable today. Here, if anywhere, we can see the debt of contemporary philosophy to neo-Kantianism. So the question is worth asking: why the move from psychology to logic in neo-Kantianism? Already in the 1860s cracks began to appear in the wall of psychological orthodoxy. Fischer and Liebmann had noted that Kant’s transcendental philosophy could not be simply psychology, because its task was to investigate the possibility of all forms of empirical knowledge, of which psychology was one. If transcendental philosophy were only empirical psychology, it would be circular, presupposing precisely what it should investigate. It was only a matter of drawing the implications of these criticisms to see that transcendental philosophy could not be psychology alone. But such was the authority of the empirical sciences that these implications were not drawn. One reason for the shift toward logic came from an inherent tension in the neo-Kantian programme. The neo-Kantians wanted philosophy to be autonomous, a science in its own right; but they also wanted it to follow the methods of the natural sciences. If philosophy were to be empirical psychology, then it would forfeit its autonomy. Hence the need for autonomy forced philosophy in a more logical direction. The reason this inference was not drawn much earlier has to do with the ambiguous status of psychology in the nineteenth century. Sometimes psychology was the discovery of the laws of psychic processes, sometimes the analysis of mental contents. When psychology became more of a natural science, its differences with philosophy became clearer. Autonomy then demanded emphasizing the more logical side of epistemology. Beyond this basic point, the reasons for the move from psychology to logic are murky. The obscurity lies partly on the individual level, with what particular thinkers thought in

27 

See Fries, ‘Ueber das Verhältniß der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 156–202. 28  Alois Riehl, Der philosophische Kriticismus (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1876), I, 8.

292   Frederick Beiser the late 1860s and early 1870s, and partly on the global level, with the philosophical and cultural Zeitgeist. On neither level is there a clear vista, hard and simple facts on which to build a solid case or even a likely story. Crucial for an understanding of this change was the thinking of the young Hermann Cohen in his happy and heady Summer of 1870. It was during those inspired months that Cohen wrote his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which set forth the new epistemological interpretation. Yet what Cohen did and thought then is poorly documented, and, given the destruction of his family archives, we are not likely to know more. What moved Windelband in the early 1870s to abandon his syncretic approach to epistemology, which combined psychology with logic, and to affirm a strictly logical approach, is also obscure. On the global level two factors deserve mention, though it is almost impossible to pinpoint their exact impact on the thinking of the neo-Kantians. One factor is the well-attested influence of Hermann Lotze on the late nineteenth century. In the third volume of his Mikrokosmus (1864) and in his 1874 Logik, Lotze had made a clear distinction between matters of fact and validity.29 According to that distinction, it is one thing to determine whether something is a matter of fact, whether it exists or not in the world, but it is quite another to determine whether or not a proposition is true or valid. A proposition could be true or valid even though it corresponds to no matter of fact. This was the case for hypothetical counterfactual and mathematical propositions, even scientific generalizations. This realm of validity, so different from the realm of existence, Lotze called ‘the most wonderful thing in the world’, and he hoped that philosophers would take it more into account. No vain hope, this. Lotze’s distinction became part of the mainstream of German philosophy in the 1870s. Later generations fully recognized Lotze’s role in changing the climate of thought.30 Psychologism, which seemed to conflate the realms of validity and matter of fact, was now passé. The other factor is the influence of Herbart. Although Herbart had jumped on the psychological band wagon in the early 1800s, insisting that Kant’s epistemology had to be refashioned as empirical psychology, he had never ceased to distinguish between matters of logic and psychology.31 He was always a good enough Kantian to insist that logic is a normative matter about how we ought to think, and that it has nothing to do with psychology, how we as a matter of fact do think. It is an important, though little appreciated, fact that Cohen, Windelband, and Riehl had all been avid students of Herbart in their early days.

29 

On the distinction, see Hermann Lotze, System der Philosophie: Erster Theil. Drei Bücher der Logik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1874), I, 465–97. See also Mikrokosmus (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1888) Book VIII, Chapter 1, ‘Die Wahrheit und das Wissen’, III, 185–243. 30  The neo-Kantians fully recognized Lotze’s importance. A student of Lotze, Windelband paid full tribute to him as ‘the greatest thinker’ of the post-idealist age. See his article ‘Die philosophischen Richtungen der Gegenwart’, in Grosse Denker, ed. Ernst von Aster (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1911), II, 376. Erich Jaensch, a student of Riehl, tells us how Riehl enthusiastically agreed with him that the decisive shift in recent philosophy came with Lotze and his distinction between validity and existence. See his ‘Zum Gedächtnis von Alois Riehl’, Kant-Studien 30 (1925), i–xxxvi, xix–xx. Also note the comment by Emil Lask: ‘Lotzes Herausarbeitung der Geltungssphäre hat der philosophischen Forschung der Gegenwart den Weg vorgezeichnet.’ See his Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, in Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923), II, 15. 31  See Johann Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (Königsberg: Unzer, 1813), §§34, 52.

Neo-Kantianism   293 Indeed, for a while they were more Herbartian than Kantian. For them to make a sharp distinction between logic and psychology they only had to heed their revered teacher.

14.5  The Challenge of Pessimism The neo-Kantian definition of philosophy as epistemology seemed, at least at first, a very effective strategy to solve the identity crisis of philosophy. It not only gave philosophy a distinct vocation, but it also brought it into connection with the positive sciences. But toward the end of the 1870s it became clear to many leading neo-Kantians—Windelband, Riehl, Volkelt, and Paulsen—that this definition of philosophy is much too narrow. It seemed to give no place to ethics, politics, and aesthetics, which had been traditional concerns of philosophy. The neo-Kantians had been so concerned that philosophy be a science that they focussed almost exclusively on its theoretical side. But what about its practical side? What about ethics, politics, and aesthetics? Could these too be a science? These were important questions, which the neo-Kantians had not faced until the late 1870s. The neo-Kantians were forced to address these issues chiefly because of one very challenging development:  the rise of pessimism. There were two thinkers behind this phenomenon, two major champions of pessimism:  Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. Though Schopenhauer’s main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,32 had first appeared in 1819 and been ignored for decades, it was rediscovered in the 1850s and had virtually become a cult classic by the 1860s. Hartmann’s chief work, Die Philosophie des Unbewussten,33 which was first published in 1869, was a huge and immediate hit, going through many printings and spawning a flood of polemical literature. The success of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s work spoke for a new cultural phenomenon: pessimism was now Zeitgeist. This was a challenge the neo-Kantians could not ignore. They soon rose to the occasion. Almost every major neo-Kantian had something to say about pessimism. From the mid-1860s until the early 1900s, Kuno Fischer, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Friedrich Paulsen, Rudolf Haym, Alois Riehl, Johannes Volkelt, Hermann Cohen, and Wilhelm Windelband wrote articles, essays, or book chapters about it. Such, indeed, was the interest in Schopenhauer that Fischer, Haym, Volkelt, and Meyer wrote some of the first monographs on him.34 By the late 1870s, pessimism had replaced materialism as the neo-Kantians’ bête noire. Schopenhauer and Hartmann had replaced Büchner and Vogt.

32 

Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819). Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten. Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Berlin: Duncker, 1869). The book was reprinted eight times in the 1870s alone. Windelband referred to the ‘meteorhaften Erfolg’ of Hartmann’s work, ‘Die Philosophischen Richtungen’, 365. 34  Rudolf Haym, Arthur Schopenhauer (Berlin: Reimer, 1864); Jürgen Bona Meyer, Arthur Schopenhauer als Mensch und Denker (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1872); Kuno Fischer, Schopenhauers Leben, Werke und Lehre, second edition, vol. IX of Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1898); Johannes Volkelt, Arthur Schopenhauer. Seine Persönlichkeit, seine Lehre, sein Glaube (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1900). 33 

294   Frederick Beiser The rise of pessimism, the popularity of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, challenged the neo-Kantians in two ways. First, it showed them that their epistemological definition of philosophy was much too narrow. Schopenhauer and Hartmann had insisted that philosophy is first and foremost reflection on the ‘puzzle of existence’, the grand question of the meaning, purpose, and value of life. This was one of the chief reasons for the popularity of their work. The neo-Kantians recognized that they had to address these interests of the public if their lectures were to be attended and their books read. Second, Schopenhauer’s pessimism undermined the neo-Kantians’ deepest moral and political convictions. All the neo-Kantians were, without exception, believers in the value of social and political action, the power of human beings to make the world a better place. Nowhere was this activism more in evidence than in their enthusiastic participation in the Fichte-Feier—the celebrations of the centenary of Fichte’s birth—that took place throughout Germany in 1862.35 What they admired in Fichte was not his Wissenschaftslehre but his political heroism, his resistance to the French occupation and his call to action for the German nation to rise against its oppressors. No one more despised political activism, though, than Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy was fundamentally quietistic, devoted to accepting the world as it is and transcending its travails through mystical experience. It was Schopenhauer’s quietism that especially disturbed the neo-Kantians and motivated their many polemics against him. It was chiefly pessimism, then, that led to the neo-Kantian concern with the practical in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This new concern took several forms: Volkelt’s call for a return to Kantian ethics; Windelband’s new promotion of world-views; Riehl’s claim that the practical is the better half of philosophy; the new anti-positivist direction of the Philosophische Monatshefte, which stressed the importance of ideas in philosophy. Yet the turn toward the practical was more programmatic than productive, more intention than deed. For the neo-Kantians found themselves in a quandary. Virtually no neo-Kantian held that the categorical imperative is a substantive foundation of ethics.36 While they accepted universalizability as a necessary requirement for the form of a maxim, they realized that it is compatible with any content, and so cannot provide a criterion to choose between particular maxims. Yet, with few exceptions, the neo-Kantians accepted Kant’s critique of empiricism in ethics, which, they believed, led down the slippery slope toward relativism.37 Friedrich Paulsen expressed the sentiment of many when he wrote in 1880: ‘Is it not a firm axiom that empiricism leads to materialism, and in the end to complete skepticism, which leads to moral nihilism?’38 But if the foundation of morals cannot be found in the rational criterion of the categorical imperative, nor in any empirical criterion, where can it be found? Regarding the foundation of morals it has to be said that neo-Kantianism is a disappointment. For the neo-Kantians made no progress in re-formulating Kant’s criterion, and 35  On this event and its importance for neo-Kantianism, see Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, 186–94. 36  Fries, Herbart and Beneke made this point in the early 1800s. It was accepted almost as a datum in the 1860s and thereafter. 37  The most important exception was Beneke. His Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten (Berlin: Mittler, 1822) sketched an empiricist and situationist ethics. 38  Friedrich Paulsen, ‘Idealismus und Positivismus’, Im Neuen Reich 10 (1880), 735–42, 738–9.

Neo-Kantianism   295 they otherwise had no new strategy for a rational foundation of ethics. Consider the following failures: •  I n Kants Begründung der Ethik (1877), Cohen saw the solution to the problem of formalism in a substantial criterion of morality he called ‘the community of rational beings’, which is essentially the Kantian ‘kingdom of ends’ where all people treat one another as ends in themselves.39 Although such a criterion would perhaps solve the problem of emptiness, Cohen did not explain why we should act on it, or why the ideal of an ethical community is ‘rational’. •  In his ‘Vom Prinzip der Moral’ (1883),40 Windelband admitted that the fundamental principle of morality, as expressed in the categorical imperative, is only formal, and that its specific content is relative and historical, depending on the specific time and place. He argued that we could give a more specific account of our duties if we presuppose a definite ideal of the highest good; however, he admitted that this ideal could not be demonstrated and that its content too would vary with history. •  In his Rechtsphilosophie (1905),41 Emil Lask sketched a programme for jurisprudence that would be the via media between the relativism of the historical school of law and the metaphysics of the natural law tradition. That middle path was the philosophy of value of Windelband and Rickert. This philosophy would address the quid juris?, which had been evaded by the historical school, and it would not require the metaphysics of the natural law tradition. But Lask stopped short of showing how this programme could be fulfilled; he does not treat, by his own admission, the methodology for a philosophy of value. •  Last but not least, there were Heinrich Rickert’s attempts to solve the problem. In his 1896 Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung Rickert proposed a transcendental ethics that would determine the universal and necessary conditions for having values; but he conceded that, because these conditions are very general and formal, their content would have to derive from history.42 Then, in his 1904 Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, he had another proposal: a philosophy of history that would show how the universal principles of morality appear in the constant purposes and common ends of different cultures in world history; but he recognized that history alone proves nothing about universal values (because empirical premises cannot yield universal conclusions, and because nothing about what is the case determines what ought to be the case), and so he admitted that their real proof would have to come from metaphysics.43 In his later years Rickert admitted failure:  he argued that there cannot be any proof for the principles of

39 

Hermann Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik (Berlin: Dümmler, 1877), 184, 198–9. See Wilhelm Windelband, Präludien II, 161–94, esp. 164, 166, 172, 182, 191, 193–4. 41  See Emil Lask, Rechtsphilosophie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1905). 42  Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1896), 731–2. Rickert made some attempt to sketch this transcendental ethics in his ‘Vom System der Werte’, Logos IV (1913), 295–327. 43  See his Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, Dritte Auflage (Heidelberg: Winter, 1924), 142–58, esp. 145–8. 40 

296   Frederick Beiser morality; and he sharply distinguished between ethical value, which depends on the will and practice, and logical validity, which is the province of reason.44

14.6  Death and Decline Although neo-Kantianism had been the dominant philosophical power in Germany from 1860 to 1914, it went into rapid decline at the end of the First World War. By 1918 Cohen and Windelband, the leaders of the Marburg and Southwestern schools, were dead; Riehl and Rickert were still alive, but their best days were behind them. The most creative and productive neo-Kantian was Ernst Cassirer, though he was now fighting a rear guard action against mounting ‘forces of darkness’. His famous dispute with Heidegger at Davos in 1929 was really the last stand of neo-Kantianism.45 It was surely an ominous sign that the youth attending that conference were more sympathetic with Heidegger than Cassirer. Why did neo-Kantianism, after ruling the intellectual landscape for generations, go into such rapid decline? The persecution of the 1930s, which drove many neo-Kantians into exile, is not the answer. For the movement was already in decline before then. We also cannot refer to the death or senescence of its most prominent figures, because that begs the question why no one came to replace them. The answer probably lies in the traumatic effects of World War I. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, there was a profound reaction against the philosophy and politics that had led to the war. It seemed to many that an entire generation of young men had died for nothing. It did not help the reputation of the neo-Kantians, then, that they had been especially active in promoting the cause of the war. With few exceptions,46 they joined in the hysteria of 1914. They did everything in their power to join the war effort and to defend the German cause.47 Cohen, Riehl, and Natorp wrote propaganda; Riehl and Windelband signed the ‘Aufruf der 93’; and Lask paid the ultimate tribute: he fell on the Eastern Front in May 1915. To be sure, the neo-Kantians were not the only German intellectuals behind the war; but they were still the dominating force in German philosophy before the war began; and they were especially vocal and visible in its behalf, insisting that their philosophy was the best ideology to rationalize sacrifice and suffering. For was it not Kant who taught that duty is categorical, and that we should follow it despite the consequences for ourselves? And was it not a categorical imperative to defend

44 

See his ‘Über logische und ethische Geltung’, Kant-Studien 19 (1914), 182–220, 207. Rickert would later prove to be a harsh critic of what he called ‘intellectualism’, that is, the attempt to prove values through logical or rational means. See his ‘Das Leben der Wissenschaft und die griechische Philosophie’, Logos XII (1923/24), 303–39. 45  On that dispute see Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). 46  The exceptions were Leonard Nelson and Ernst Cassirer. Nelson’s school adopted an admirable pacifist stance. On Cassirer’s attitude toward the War, see Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 391–2. 47  On the role of the Marburg neo-Kantians in the war, see Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 373–92.

Neo-Kantianism   297 the mother land from English, French, and Russian aggression? Yes, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitan and pacifist, was the best regimental officer to lead the youth to slaughter. The deepest moral beliefs of the neo-Kantians were also shattered by the war. Although neither pessimists nor optimists, neo-Kantians did believe in the power of human action to improve the world. But it was precisely this faith the war had destroyed. Death and destruction on such a colossal scale had shown that human beings have a greater power to destroy than improve themselves. The neo-Kantians thought that, directed intelligently, the arts and sciences could improve life and morals; but technology had wiped out millions with ease. The war seemed the ultimate vindication of Rousseau’s pessimism: the arts and sciences were not improving but destroying morals. This too was Schopenhauer’s last laugh against his neo-Kantian foes. If the greatest striving leads to the greatest suffering, are we not better off trying to escape than engage the world? And so the most powerful philosophical movement of the nineteenth century came to a sad and inglorious end. But is it really surprising it came to this? For all its concerns with the aetherial and erudite, not even philosophy escapes its world.

Bibliography Primary Beneke, Friedrich, Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit. Berlin: Mittler, 1832. Beneke, Friedrich, Die Philosophie in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Erfahrung, zur Spekulation und zum Leben. Berlin: Mittler, 1833. Beneke, Friedrich, Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten. Berlin: Mittler, 1822. Bona Meyer, Jürgen, Philosophische Zeitfragen. Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1870. Bona Meyer, Kant’s Psychologie. Berlin: Hertz, 1870. Büchner, Louis, Kraft und Stoff. Frankfurt: Meidiger, 1855. Cohen, Hermann, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin: Dümmler, 1871. Cohen, Hermann, Kants Begründung der Ethik. Berlin: Dümmler, 1877. Czolbe, Heinrich, Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus. Leipzig: Costenoble, 1855. Fischer, Kuno, Die beiden kantischen Schulen in Jena. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862. Fischer, Kuno, Kant’s Leben und die Grundlage seiner Lehre. Mannheim: Bassermann, 1860. Fortlage, Carl, ‘Die Stellung Kants zur Philosophie vor ihm und nach ihm’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft IV (1838), 91–123. Fries, Jakob Friedrich, Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling. Leipzig: Reinicke, 1803. Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Ueber das Verhältniß der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 156–202. Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Propädeutik einer allgemeinen empirischen Psychologie’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 203–67. Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Allgemeine Uebersicht der empirischen Erkentnisse des Gemüths’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 354–402. Hartmann, Eduard von, Philosophie des Unbewussten. Berlin: Duncker, 1869. Helmholtz, Hermann, Über das Sehen des Menschen. Leipzig: Voss, 1855. Herbart, Johann Friedrich, Ueber philosophisches Studium. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1807. Herbart, Johann Friedrich, Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. Königsberg: Unzer, 1813.

298   Frederick Beiser Lange, Friedrich Albert, Geschichte des Materialismus. Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866. Lask, Emil, Gesammelte Schriften. Tübingen: Mohr, 1923. 3 vols. Liebmann, Otto, Kant und die Epigonen. Stuttgart: Schober, 1865. Paulsen, Friedrich, ‘Idealismus und Positivismus’, Im Neuen Reich 10 (1880), 735–42. Rickert, Heinrich, ‘Vom Begriff der Philosophie’, Logos I (1910), 1–35. Rickert, Heinrich, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung. Tübingen: Mohr, 1902. Rickert, Heinrich, ‘Über logische und ethische Geltung’, Kant-Studien 19 (1914), 182–220. Rickert, Heinrich, ‘Das Leben der Wissenschaft und die griechische Philosophie’, Logos XII (1923/24), 303–39. Rickert, Heinrich, ‘Vom System der Werte’, Logos IV (1913), 295-327. Riehl, Alois, Der philosophische Kriticismus. Leipzig: Engelmann, 1876. Schaarschmidt, Carl, ‘Vom rechten und vom falschen Kriticismus’, Philosophische Monatshefte 14 (1878), 1–12. Schopenhauer, Arthur, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819. Vogt, Carl, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft. Gießen: Ricker, 1855. Volkelt, Johannes, Kant’s Kategorischer Imperativ und die Gegenwart. Vienna: Selbstverlag des Lesevereins der deutschen Studenten Wien’s, 1875. Windelband, Wilhelm, Präludien. Tübingen: Mohr, 1924. Zeller, Eduard, Ueber Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie. Heidelberg: Groos, 1861.

Secondary Beck, L. W. ‘Neo-Kantianism’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1967. V, pp. 468–73. Blencke, Erna, ‘Zur Geschichte der neuen Fries’schen Schule und der Jacob Friedrich Fries-Gesellschaft’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978) 199–208. Gerhardt, Volker, et al., Berliner Geist. Eine Geschichte der Berliner Universitätsphilosophie bis 1946. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999. Friedman, Michael, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Gordon, Peter, Continental Divide:  Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010. Holzhey, Harold, ‘Neukantianismus’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Basel: Schwabe, 1984. VI, pp. 747–54. Köhnke, Klaus Christian, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Kronfeld, Arthur, ‘Geleitworte zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der neue Friesischen Schule’, in Das Wesen der psychiatrischen Erkenntnis. Berlin: Springer, 1920, pp. 46–65. Ollig, Hans-Ludwig, Der Neukantianismus. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. Sieg, Ulrich, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994. Willey, Thomas, Back to Kant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978.

Chapter 15

Ex isten ti a lism Katia Hay 15.1 Introduction In his lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ (L’existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), delivered in Paris shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sartre denounced the way in which the notion of ‘existentialism’ was ‘so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer mean[t]‌anything at all’.1 Sartre presented himself here as a representative of atheistic existentialism and conceived his lecture as an attempt to restore and define its precise philosophical meaning. Nevertheless, determining anything like the doctrine or general principles of this ‘philosophical movement’ has been problematic from its very coinage in the 1920s. Even today it remains difficult to find a clear-cut definition as well as to decide whom to include in the list of the so called ‘existentialists’—unless of course we consider Sartre’s philosophy to be the paradigm of existentialism, since he is one of the few philosophers who openly defined himself as such. But identifying the term ‘existentialism’ with Sartre’s philosophy would fall short of providing a satisfactory explanation of the fact that philosophers and writers such as Jaspers, Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Malraux, Beckett, Camus, and so on are included in almost all compendiums, compilations and handbooks on existentialism—regardless of whether or not they denied belonging to the existentialists. As Friedman puts it: ‘there is no single philosophy that can claim to set the standard for what existentialism is, despite the claims of Sartre’.2 The difficulty of finding a definite understanding of the term only increases when it is applied anachronistically to authors from the nineteenth century, such as Nietzsche, Schelling, Kierkegaard, or Dostoyevsky. The fact that Sartre was influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard does not necessarily convert the latter into existentialists. And yet, most scholars3

1 

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), 25. Further references to this text will be abbreviated EH, followed by page number. 2  Maurice Friedman, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Father of Atheist Existentialism’ (Journal of Existentialism, VI-23, 1966), 269. 3  See for instance: Harold John Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers: Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Jaspers. Marcel. Heidegger. Sartre (New York: Routledge, 1952), 12. Also see Robert Solomon,

300   Katia Hay consider them both not only as being the precursors of existentialism, but also as existentialists tout court. It is not our intention to undertake the impossible task of providing the ultimate answer to the question: what is existentialism?, nor to decide whether authors such as Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche should be considered existentialists or not. The question to be answered here is: what makes these nineteenth-century philosophers liable to be included in the history or pre-history of existentialism? Or, what makes them ‘form a natural family’4 together with philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre, or Camus? This chapter is mainly dedicated to the analysis of the meaning of the ‘death of God’, which—at least according to Sartre—constitutes the beginning of existentialism. However, by establishing affinities between Nietzsche, Schelling, and Kierkegaard in relation to Sartre and Camus (as ‘official’ existentialists), this study will also lead us to other ‘typical’ existentialist topics, such as the problem of ‘becoming who you are’ or the conflict between freedom and necessity.

15.2  The death of God As Camus writes in his book L’homme révolté (1951) translated as The Rebel, Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God (i.e. the Christian God) must primarily be understood as the diagnosis of a clinician.5 The proclamation: ‘God is dead!’ is the result of a conscious examination and expresses the awareness of the inexorable process of nihilism shattering western culture: ‘it was not Nietzsche’s plan to kill God, he found Him dead in the souls of his contemporaries’.6 Indeed, this is exactly what Nietzsche depicts through the figure of the madman in §125 of The Gay Science (1882, GS): running around the marketplace, crying, searching for God, he only causes laughter among the people, for they do not believe in God anymore—which does not necessarily mean that they have overcome God,7 quite on the contrary: they are not even aware of the consequences of his irrevocable death, which is first announced to them by the madman. There is, in effect, a huge difference between not believing in God and declaring His death; while the first is the expression of a personal option or subjective realization, the second is a statement about an irreversible event in the history of western civilization, the meaning of which does not depend on our personal belief in God. As Friedman rightly says, ‘the death of God is not a theological statement. It’s a historical one’.8 It is therefore not surprising that, towards the end of the aphorism, the madman’s words should provoke such disconcertion among his already nihilistic listeners.

‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: The Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’ (International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002), 42. 4 Blackham., op. cit., V.

5  Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 133 edition, 1951), 88. Further references to this text will be abbreviated HR. 6 Camus, HR, 52 (my translation). 7  See Isabelle Wienand, Significations de la Mort de Dieu chez Nietzsche d’Humain, trop Humain à Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 147. 8 Friedman, op. cit., 272. See also Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead”’, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160.

Existentialism   301 In a certain sense, Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique of modernity is very similar to Kierkegaard’s in his book The Sickness unto Death (1849, SD). For, although Kierkegaard’s criticism may appear to be directed solely to the individual Christian who has lost his faith in God, as Dupré rightly observes, his diagnosis is also a diagnosis of a ‘perverse dialectic’ affecting Christianity as a whole.9 Kierkegaard himself speaks of his insight into modernity as that of a ‘connoisseur’ or a ‘physician of souls’ when he writes that: there is not a single human being who does not despair [. . .] in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness [. . .] an anxiety about a possibility in life or an anxiety about himself, [so that] he goes about with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence.10

The condition of despair is not over something, as the modern man might think, but has to do with our inability to understand and accept ourselves and our true nature caught between the finite and the infinite. In other words, it has to do with wanting to be something we are not, which Kierkegaard interprets as a form of wanting to escape from ourselves without ever really being able to do so (not even through death).11 Thus, for Kierkegaard the only way of healing this disease is by recuperating our true relation to ourselves, or as he puts it, our relation to the ‘self’. Until here the similarities with Nietzsche are quite significant, especially if we think of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5, Z) and the way in which Zarathustra (who is also dealing with the aftermath of the death of God) needs to return to his loneliness in order to overcome his despair in his ‘stillest hour’: ‘Oh Zarathustra your fruits are ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruits! So you must go back to your solitude: for you are yet to become mellow’.12 But for Kierkegaard, this form of solitude which puts us in relation to something we are not yet, but at the same time constitutes our truest being, is only possible if we acknowledge that this relation, this self, has somehow ‘been established by something else’ (SD).13 We can only reach the kind of solitude that will enable us to exist as individuals before God,14 so that: ‘the self is only healthy and free from despair when [. . .] it is grounded transparently in God’ (SD).15 This indeed seems to be totally different from Nietzsche’s approach in §125 of Gay Science, where the possibility of reestablishing our relation to God is vehemently

9  Louis Dupré, ‘The Sickness unto Death: Critique of Modern Age’. In: Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 34 and 42. See also Thomas Miles, ‘Nietzsche. Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life’. In: Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011), 264: ‘Kierkegaard’s concept of despair and Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism both describe not some particular problem or lack, but the internal collapse of an entire way of life’. 10  Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: a Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, ed. 2004), 52. Further references will be abbreviated SD, followed by page number. 11  ‘[. . .] despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die’ (Kierkegaard, SD, 48). 12  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. G. Parkes (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005), 128. Further references will be abbreviated Z, followed by page number. KSA references will also be given in brackets, in this case: [KSA 4.189]. 13 Kierkegaard, SD, 43. 14 Dupré, op. cit., 38. 15 Kierkegaard, SD, 60.

302   Katia Hay excluded: God is dead and ‘God remains dead!’ (GS, §125).16 Or as Zarathustra will say to the last pope, God ‘is thoroughly (gründlich) dead’ (Z).17 And this means, as the last pope observes, that not even the solitary man in the forests will find Him. Solitude and reclusion from the world is not the solution for Nietzsche. The death of God has to be overcome. And yet, one could argue that the God Kierkegaard means is not so different from the ‘Stillest Hour’, who talks to Zarathustra in this passage, or from ‘life’ in the chapter ‘The DanceSong’. Furthermore, in the same way that these constitute only ‘stages’ of Zarathustra’s particular trajectory, Kierkegaard also affirms that the process of becoming the self is a process of ‘infinitely coming away from oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the finitization’.18 In any case, what is important for us now, is to see how both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard consider that they are revealing the nature of a devastating historical process which is somehow related to the fact that people do not believe in God anymore (or in more Nietzschean terms: ‘the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable’ (GS, §343)19). Moreover, they both consider that the power of this nihilistic process lies in the fact that it remains unconscious (only the madman from Nietzsche’s Gay Science is able to articulate what the men at the marketplace, in their own non-belief and cynicism, have not yet consciously realized). But while Kierkegaard directly refers to something we can all more or less relate to, namely the feeling of despair, it is not so easy to understand what Nietzsche means by the death of God.20 In §125 the madman describes it as the vanishing of the sea; it’s as if the horizon had been wiped away, or the earth had been unchained from the sun, so that there is no ‘up and down’ (GS)21 anymore. Likewise, in §343 Nietzsche explains how the death of God entails the downfall (einfallen) of everything that ‘was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it—for example, our entire European morality’ (GS).22 One could say that the death of God means the loss of all frames of reference guiding us in our judgments and actions, or more radically, that it means the disappearance of the most basic conditions (space, water, light) for all known modes of human existence. In his text ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead” ’ (1943), Heidegger argues that, through the use of the three images—horizon, sea, and sun—Nietzsche indicates that the murder of God ‘means the elimination, through man, of the supersensory world’23 or, as he also puts it, the end of metaphysics,24 which he then understands as the ‘the fundamental structure of beings in their entirety, so far as this entirety is differentiated into a sensory and a supersensory world, the former of which is supported and determined by the latter’.25 In 16  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. Further references will be abbreviated GS, followed by page number. (KSA references will also be given in brackets: [KSA 3.481]). 17 Nietzsche, Z, 229 [KSA 4.326] (my italics). 18 Kierkegaard, SD, 60. 19  GS, 199 [KSA 3.573]. 20 Wienand, op. cit., stresses the way in which the metaphorical form of Nietzsche’s sentence informs its meaning/s. 21 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481]. 22 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481]. 23 Heidegger, op. cit., 195. 24  ‘Metaphysics, which for Nietzsche is Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end’ (Heidegger, op. cit., 162). 25 Heidegger, op. cit., 164.

Existentialism   303 other words, it is not only about the loss of the ‘ground and goal of everything that is real’,26 but also, and most importantly, about the loss of the very logic sustaining the thought of grounds and goals, or in Heidegger’s terms: it is the loss of ‘the supersensory as a realm (das Übersinnliche als Bereich)’.27 And yet, however compelling it may appear (especially if we consider a preparatory note for Book III of GS where Nietzsche explicitly equates the shadows of God with metaphysics),28 the problem with Heidegger’s interpretation is that, by exchanging one obscure term (God) with another no less obscure notion (metaphysics), in the end it seems to reduce Nietzsche’s diagnosis to a one-directional claim against metaphysics. Heidegger takes Nietzsche’s word ‘God is dead’ as a univocal philosophical position and maintains that Nietzsche’s position is ‘a mere countermovement [which] necessarily remains trapped, like everything “anti”, in the essence of what it is challenging’.29 But a closer reading of some passages from Gay Science will show that this is not necessarily the case. The death of God challenges all our moral conceptions; it enables us to question not only the origin of moral norms and assumptions, but also their value, as he explains in his Genealogy of Morality (1887, GM).30 In this sense, Nietzsche’s singular critique of morality can be understood as the process of tracking down the consequences of the death of God. But in addition to this, Nietzsche argues that the death of God also challenges our faith in science and in truth because: it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests [. . .] even we knowers of today, we godless antimetaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith [. . .] that God is truth; that truth is divine [. . .] (GS, §344).31

Since God is dead, the immediate consequence of Nietzsche’s insight here is that science too has become groundless. That is: not only were we (i.e. the meticulous atheistic antimetaphysicians) the ones who killed God, as the madman said,32 but with him, we also killed the possibility of science überhaupt. The only way science can survive now is, thus, by remaining blind in the face of its fundamental basis, which is nothing else than Christian morality disguised in the form of a supposedly faultless (unkritisierbarer) will to Truth (GM, III-§25).33 Otherwise—so it seems—science will become unsustainable, entering a never-ending process of self-destruction. In a certain sense Gay Science constitutes Nietzsche’s first attempt to overcome the auto-destructive structure of science turning against itself. And his response is to show the necessity of creating new values (= another morality) and, with this, another definition 26 Heidegger, op. cit., 163. 28 

27 Heidegger, op. cit., 169.

‘ . . . beware of God’s shadow.—Also known as metaphysics [. . . hütet euch vor dem Schatten Gottes.—Man nennt ihn auch Metaphysik]’ (Nachlass, KSA 14.253, my translation). 29 Heidegger, op. cit., 162. 30  ‘ [. . .] we need a critique of moral values, the values of these values should itself, for once, be examined’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. Further references will be abbreviated GM, followed by page number. (KSA references will also be given in brackets: [KSA 5.253])). 31 Nietzsche, GS, 201 [KSA 3.577]. 32 ‘We have killed him—you and I’! (Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481]). 33 Nietzsche, GM, 113 [KSA 5.402].

304   Katia Hay and understanding of science. For, the dismantling of the underlying assumptions that made us believe in a certain form of science does not necessarily entail the abolition of science and truth or the end of knowledge as such. On the contrary, the consequences of the death of God are: not at all gloomy, but much more like a new barely describable type of light, happiness, relief, enjoyment, encouragement, dawn. . . Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel touched by the light of a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, intuitions, expectations—finally the horizon seems clear again [. . .]; finally our ships may set again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the knower (Wagniss des Erkennenden) is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’ (GS, §343).34

Apart from its striking resemblance to a passage from Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death,35 the contrast with the dread with which the madman (GS, §125) describes the aftermath of the death of God could not be greater. The horizon, then, seemed to have been wiped out, whereas now it is wider and richer than ever: ‘The world has once again become infinite’,36 as Nietzsche writes in GS, §374. And it is infinite because of the infinite interpretations it now carries within itself. Overcoming the ‘death of science’ means, hence, to understand that there are infinite ways in which we can understand and undertake our task as knowers and scientists. And this means that, far from being ‘trapped’ in its anti-ness (as Heidegger suggests), Nietzsche’s position is one that intends to open up possibilities, to create a new way of understanding and pursuing science: science-philosophy as physiology, as psychology, as genealogy . . .37 As Camus writes in relation to the meaning of the death of God for Nietzsche: ‘an infinite joy will arise from the absolute despair’.38 In other words, the announcement of the death of God, the diagnosis of the death of science, and the decadence of morality are not Nietzsche’s last word. He is not an existential pessimist or fatalist à la Cioran (who, precisely because of his pessimism, is hardly ever considered to be an existentialist). For Nietzsche, the realization of the death of God is only the first step of a much broader process of overcoming and self-overcoming, because, in the end, the underlying force driving his writings is that of life-affirmation. This affirmativeness is also more or less explicitly present in the works of Schelling and Kierkegaard, and it is precisely this way of responding to the problem of decay, untruth and insoluble error that they have in common with the existentialists. Thus—coming back to the passage quoted above—if the ‘new open sea’ stands for the infinite interpretations, then the ‘daring of the knower’ that is now ‘allowed again’ stands for the infinite questions that can now be made without fear;39 there is no fear of breaking down solid certainties 34 Nietzsche, GS, 199 [KSA 3.574] (translation revised). 35 

In relation to his quite shattering analysis of despair, Kierkegaard writes: ‘[This observation] is not gloomy; on the contrary it tries to shed light on what one generally banishes to a certain obscurity. It is not discouraging; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man with regard to the highest demand that can be made of him’ (SD, 52). 36 Nietzsche, GS, 239 [KSA 3.626]. 37  See Nietzsche, GS, §335: ‘Long live physics!’. 38 Camus, HR, 96 (my translation). 39  As he will write in his Genealogy, all those ‘numb’ scientists ‘fear only one thing: coming to consciousness’ (GM, 110 [KSA 5.398]).

Existentialism   305 and leaving firm shores anymore, because after having ‘forsaken the land and gone to sea’, after having ‘demolished the land [. . .] there is no more land’ (GS, §124), that is, there is no need for solid unquestionable truths.40 This, once again, does not mean that knowledge is impossible. On the contrary: knowledge is now liberated from all its former prejudices. We find a similar line of thought in Schelling’s essay Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft (On the Nature of Philosophy as Science) from his Erlangen Lectures (1825, EV), where he argues that philosophy must be understood as an ongoing process in which error is an essential element. Schelling also compares the philosopher to a sailor: those, who do not dare to leave the harbor, surely, won’t encounter any dangers, they won’t commit any mistakes, but they will never enable philosophy to fulfill its task either, that is, to become true philosophy.41 Like a hero (or heroine), the philosopher has to be able to leave everything behind; ‘even God’, says Schelling, ‘for at this point God is also merely an entity (nur ein Seyendes)’ (EV).42 The similarities between Schelling’s text and Nietzsche’s project in Gay Science, however, do not concern only their use of certain images (the open sea as a symbol for the ‘dangers’ the philosopher has to be prepared to confront; the necessity of abandoning all fixed beliefs and the use of God as a symbol for these certitudes and beliefs . . .), but also their conception of science/philosophy as the history of philosophical systems which are all necessarily wrong (curiously Schelling also refers to these ‘systems’ as illnesses). In other words, they both argue that the only possible way in which philosophy/science can attain its goal 43 is to go through all the different and opposed systems, but to never stay in any of them (EV).44 Considering the intrinsic opposition and mutual exclusion of the different theories throughout the history of philosophy, or what he calls the bellum intestinum in human knowledge (EV),45 Schelling argues that one must give up hope on the possibility of ever finding a particular perspective (eine einzelne Ansicht) which would permanently overrule the others. The task is thus to enable these different systems or perspectives to coexist.46 For Schelling, as for Nietzsche, all this entails that philosophy must become aware of and accept its finitude;47 that is, it must always integrate a moment of auto-criticism, the possibility of a different perspective (which is, by the way, also important for Kierkegaard). And although there are also many differences between them (Schelling for instance still refers to this new form of philosophy as the ultimate ‘system’ whose true subject is ‘eternal freedom’), the intention and the project for future philosophy is in both cases the same,

40 Nietzsche, GS, 125 [KSA 3.480]. See also §23 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

41  ‘He, who does not even leave the harbor and whose whole effort consists not in sailing, but in avoiding philosophy ever becoming philosophy through an eternal philosophizing over philosophy, he has no dangers to fear’ (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft. In: Sämtliche Werke IX, 209–53. K. F. A. Schelling (ed.). (Stuttgart/Augsburg 1856–61), 211. My translation). Further references will be given as SW IX, followed by page number. 42 Schelling, SW IX, 217. 43  Its goal being namely to be true to itself; this idea will be discussed in the next section. 44 Schelling, SW IX, 219. 45 Schelling, SW IX, 209. 46 Schelling, SW IX, 213: ‘die Aufgabe ist eben, daß sie wirklich zusammenbestehen’. 47  As Zarathustra will say: ‘let will to truth mean this to you: that everything be transformed into what is humanly thinkable, humanly visible, humanly feelable (Menschen-Fühlbares)!’ (Nietzsche, Z, 73 [KSA 4.109–410]). As Camus observes, ‘the decisive step that Nietzsche enables the rebel spirit to take, is to jump from the negation to the secularization of the ideal’ (HR, 103).

306   Katia Hay namely to open up the space for different ways of doing and writing philosophy. However, this form of multiplying the ways in which science (Wissenschaft) should be understood and developed, the necessity of introducing as many perspectives as possible in our search for knowledge, has been considered to be a reason for not including Nietzsche among the existentialists, who generally privilege one perspective ‘over all others in the interpretation of human reality’.48 Furthermore, if we contemplate some of the readings of Sartre that emphasize the epistemological aspect of his philosophy and claim that Sartre’s main concern was to find a ‘solid basis’ to found the possibility of knowledge,49 the differences with Nietzsche could not be greater. And yet, one could argue that Nietzsche’s concept of a gay science is the result of applying to knowledge the same principle that he will apply to morality and human existence in his Zarathustra and which is certainly one of the most influential and recurrent topics among the existentialists of the twentieth century, namely the principle of creativity. Creativity is both for Sartre and Camus, as well as for Nietzsche the main counterforce against nihilism. Camus calls it the ‘creative revolt’.50 It is certainly a recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But perhaps its relation with the death/absence of God is most clear in the chapter ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’: Once one said ‘God’ when one looked upon distant seas; but now I  have taught you to say: Overhuman. God is a supposition; but I want that your supposing might not reach farther than your creative will. [. . .] Away from God and Gods this will has lured me: what would there be to create if Gods—existed!51

One may appreciate a comparable thought in Schelling, when he says in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) in relation to God’s existence: ‘if he were to be, then we would not be (wäre er, so wären wir nicht)’.52 Although, for Schelling this does not mean that God is dead, but rather that he is still to come, that he is always becoming. The problem they are both dealing with (namely human freedom) and the way in which, for both (as well as for Kierkegaard), dealing with this problem entails a reconfiguration of our relationship to God, is very similar. Moreover, one could also argue that what makes them inspiring for later existentialist writers is precisely this. Nietzsche’s response to the decomposition of Christian morality is to emphasize the infinite possibilities that are now open to us. The realization of the death of God is the first step towards the creation or invention of new modes of existence. This, however, does not entail the death of morality as such, because recognizing that He is dead also means understanding that we were the ones who actually ‘put’ him there in the first place. We created those values which have lost their validity. Therefore the new task could not be to lament the loss, but rather to create new values, affirmative, life-enhancing values . . . but 48 

See Richard Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: After the Death of God’. In Steven Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 115. 49  See David G. Joannis, Sartre et le problème de la connaissance (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996), 131. 50 Camus, HR, especially chapter IV. 51 Nietzsche, Z, 75 [KSA 4.111]. 52 Schelling, SW III, 603 (my translation).

Existentialism   307 this time with the awareness that they can always be (and should be) put into question over and over again. In the end, Nietzsche’s main concern is to enable all possible forms of questioning; the driving question thus being: is there any question that has not been asked yet? Morality is, in this sense, the same as for Sartre: ‘always inevitable and impossible at the same time’.53 It is inevitable because whether we are aware of it or not, we are always acting within a certain framework of values, impossible because once we realize that ‘God is dead’, we also know that there are no eternal values, that morality as such is somehow necessarily relative. But if the realization of the death of God, as we have argued here, is the first step towards a new, freer, opener way of understanding science, morality, and human existence, why then is the man who killed God in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the ‘ugliest man’? When Zarathustra encounters him in the ghastly valley, called ‘Serpent’s Death’,54 he immediately guesses why he killed God: ‘You could not endure him who saw you all the time and through and through, you ugliest man!’.55 But, that he could not endure this form of intrusiveness, also explains why he has taken refuge in such a deathly and isolated place, namely because he cannot stand anybody looking at him and pitying him. He believes Zarathustra honors his ugliness by not doing so and he recites some of Zarathustra’s teachings, but it is not clear whether he really understands anything, for, at the end, Zarathustra says to himself: ‘How poor is the human after all! [. . .] How ugly, [. . .] how full of hidden shame!’.56 The ugliest man is so terribly ugly, because he has not been able to overcome himself. He is ugly because he is not capable of dealing with the fact that, as Sartre will say about the man who suddenly realizes that God does not exist, ‘he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself [. . .] he is without excuse.’57 He cannot deal with his own freedom. He cannot affirm his actions (= his past) and he is obsessed and trapped in the image he thinks the others have of him. We could say with Sartre that he is trapped in the ‘hell’, which is the ‘others’, like the protagonists of Sartre’s theatre play, Huis Clos (1946). Indeed: l’enfer, c’est les autres. Sartre’s protagonists are in hell because they are (symbolically) dead, and they are dead because they cannot break with their worries, their habits and they remain victims of the judgments of the others.58 The others, for Sartre, as well as for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (who is constantly worrying and overcoming his worry about how the others react to him), are the only mirror we have to relate to ourselves: whatever we may say of ourselves, there is always part of the judgment of the others that comes into play.59 But this does not mean that we must always remain trapped in the images we think the others have of us. It is possible, says Sartre, to change our actions, it is always possible to come out of the circle of hell in

53 

‘Le “problème” moral naît de ce que la Morale est pour nous tout en même temps inévitable et impossible’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 212. My translation). 54 Nietzsche, Z, 230 [KSA 4.327]. 55 Nietzsche, Z, 230 [KSA 4.328]. 56 Nietzsche, Z, 233 [KSA 4.332]. 57 Sartre, EH, 34. 58 Sartre, J.-P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos. Audio-CD 2004. Paris: Gallimard-Emen. This is a recording of the ‘preface parlé’ to a recorded version of the play in 1965 (my translation). 59 Sartre, J.-P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos.

308   Katia Hay which we live, or, in Nietzsche’s words: it is possible to overcome ourselves: ‘the human is something that must be overcome’(Z).60 In relation to Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, one could say that the ugliest man suffers from what Kierkegaard considers to be the lowest form of despair, a despair of weakness. The ugliest man lives his life in quiet lostness (Either/Or, 1843, EO), that is, as if his life was not his life, and despairs at not willing to be himself. This means that he knows he is in despair, but he does not understand what the real cause is: ‘what he says is in a sense true, only not in the way he says it. He stands with his face inverted, and what he says must be understood backwards’.61 This is a passive form of despair and there is no consciousness of the (infinite side of the) self: ‘It despairs and swoons and then lies quite still as though lifeless, [. . .] like certain lower animals whose only weapon or defense is to lie quite still and feign death’.62 What is interesting about this interpretation is that it shows fundamental affinities between Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s critiques of certain life-negating ways of living. In other words, the parallel reading of these passages shows the extent to which their philosophies have to be understood as an attempt to answer the question: what does it mean to be really alive? And for both philosophers this has to do with learning to love life and to affirm human existence with all its contradictions, complexities, and pains. Or, as Camus would write in his Myth of Sisyphus (1942): ‘one does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness’.63 In a sense we find a similar pattern in Schelling’s Ages of the World (1811, WA), when he describes the difference between having a ‘real’ past (eigentliche Vergangenheit) and being trapped in one’s own past. Whereas the first is only possible through an active self-differentiation (Scheidung von sich selbst), which also implies a certain capacity to confront and overcome one’s own past, the second is like living without living.64 It’s like not having or being any temporality at all: no real past, no present (= no real presence), and no future. Needless to say, this concern with what it means for us to be really alive or to have a real presence and a real temporality is a reason for including these authors among the so called existentialists.65 Conversely though, one might consider the despair of Nietzsche’s ugliest man to be what Kierkegaard calls a demonic despair, which is the most potentiated form of despair and is described as a will that hopelessly ‘wills to be itself’. In this case, the ugliest man has already comprehended the structure of his self, namely that he is the self-relation of a synthesis (i.e. a synthesis between freedom and necessity, the infinite and the finite), but in spite of this, he wants to be what he thinks is his real, concrete self. He knows he is in

60 Nietzsche, Z, 233 [KSA 4.332].

61 Kierkegaard, SD, 82 (translation revised, my italics).

62 Kierkegaard, SD, 83. Note the similarity with Nietzsche’s description of Serpent’s Death Valley, where the ugliest man lives. 63  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 122. Further references will be abbreviated MS, followed by page number. 64 Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, ed. M. Schröter (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1966), 11. 65  See for instance Camus’ approach to philosophy in the introduction to the Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’ (MS, 3).

Existentialism   309 despair, but he wants to stay in despair, because this has become the only thing he can hang on to: [. . .] he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him, for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right. This finally fixes itself so firmly in his head that he becomes frightened of eternity [. . .] in case it should take away from him what [. . .] gives him infinite superiority over other people, what [. . .] is his right to be who he is.66

For Nietzsche, the problem of the ugliest man lies in his pettiness and his petty sorrows, that is: in his failure to overcome himself and to see himself as a ‘bridge’ for something better. For Kierkegaard, the problem has to do with him not being able to accept his dependency on or his relation to something much greater than him, namely God (i.e. Kierkegaard’s God). It is the ‘leap to faith’ that is lacking. But, despite the differences, the structure Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (as well as Sartre) are criticizing is essentially the same. Both Nietzsche’s ‘ugliest man’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘man who desperately wants to be himself’ are unable to let go of their torments, for they have become identical to them. In both cases the problem lies in having mistaken the art of ‘becoming who we are’, with the desire to be something fixed, concrete, easy to grasp and to understand. But, as Sartre says: ‘an existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined’.67 Or in Kierkegaard’s terms: ‘a self, every moment it exists, is in a process of becoming; for the self [kata dynamin—potentiality] is not present actually, it is merely what is to come into existence’.68

15.3  Becoming Who You Are That ‘man is still to be determined’, the idea that the essence of human existence will always remain unknown, because we are constantly becoming and defining ourselves a posteriori, goes hand in hand with the notion of absolute freedom: ‘there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom’, Sartre writes.69 We find an almost identical formulation in Kierkegaard, when he says that ‘the self is freedom’.70 But, for Kierkegaard, in order to attain this freedom, in order to become this true freedom (which is not to be confused with liberum arbitrium), the self first has to become itself, and this means that human freedom can only be achieved ‘through despair’,71 for ‘those who claim to be free of despair have not discovered themselves as a self’ yet.72 This does not mean, however, that we are not free before we become conscious of ourselves as ‘selves’, but it does mean that there are different levels of freedom and that our task is to act in a way that may enrich our freedom: to choose freedom. Moreover, because the task of becoming itself ‘can only be done in the 66 Kierkegaard, SD, 103 (my italics). 68 Kierkegaard, SD, 60. 70 Kierkegaard, SD, 59. 72 

67 Sartre, EH, 55.

69 Sartre, EH, 34.

71 Kierkegaard, SD, 57.

Grøn (1994), The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette B. L. Knox (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008), 110.

310   Katia Hay relationship to God’ (SD),73 to become truly free, for Kierkegaard, means to accept the fact that the self is grounded in the Power which posited it,74 that is, it means to accept ‘the fact that there is a God, and that he himself, his self, exists before this God’ (SD).75 The realization of freedom implies, thus, to affirm necessity, for it is only by affirming our forsakenness that we will be able to overcome the despair that arose precisely from trying to fight against it. On the other hand, if, as Kierkegaard argues, despair is the absence of true faith, then it should also be considered as a sin. Despair is the original sin, and this leads us to the question about the necessity of sin for the realization of human freedom. This is certainly a central theme in Kierkegaard’s writings, such as The Concept of Anxiety (1844), but one could also argue that it constitutes an important theme in Camus’ The Rebel, where he raises the question whether it is possible to act without committing an offence.76 Without wanting to go as far as Lev Shestov, who in the introduction to his book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1934) compares the ‘killing of God’ in Nietzsche with the problematic of the original sin in Kierkegaard,77 it is still meaningful to ask the question whether such a form of freedom (the realization of which is only possible through the acceptance of having willingly participated in something which presents itself as being totally unavoidable) is not also characteristic of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This is indeed Camus’ interpretation when he writes: ‘total adherence to total necessity—thus is his [i.e. Nietzsche’s] paradoxical understanding of freedom’.78 The problem of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy (or the tension between fatalism and self-creation) has certainly been a key factor when it has come to deciding whether or not to include him among the existentialists.79 And still, it is important to underline that what makes Nietzsche’s or Kierkegaard’s concept of freedom interesting for authors such as Sartre or Camus is precisely its paradoxical nature. Nietzsche’s amor fati (GS, §276) is probably the most obvious instance in which freedom is depicted as the affirmation of necessity. Nietzsche presents his amor fati as his ‘dearest wish and thought’; a thought or a perspective which will enable him to ‘see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them’ and, hence, to become a true ‘yessayer’.80 We find a very similar pathos in GS, §341, where Nietzsche introduces the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same and presents it as a transforming thought which, if it does not destroy us, will prove that we are ‘well disposed’ enough ‘to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal (ewigen Bestätigung und Besiegelung)’.81 The yes-sayer is also the one who can say as Zarathustra: ‘Was that life? Well 73 Kierkegaard, SD, 59. 75 Kierkegaard, SD, 57.

74 Kierkegaard, SD, 44.

76  ‘Il s’agit de savoir si l’innocence, à partir du moment où elle agit, ne peut s’empêcher de tuer’ (Camus, HR, 14). 77  Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969), 25ff. 78 Camus, HR, 96 (my translation). 79  See for instance, Solomon, ‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: The Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’ (International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002), 41–54. See also Brian Leiter, ‘The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche’. In: Brian Leiter and John Richardson (eds.), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 80 Nietzsche, GS, 157 [KSA 3.521]. 81 Nietzsche, GS, 194–5 [KSA 3.570].

Existentialism   311 then! One more time!’82 And this is exactly the attitude Camus highlights and admires from the myth of Sisyphus, the highwayman: It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. [. . .] At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.83

Sisyphus is stronger than his fate, because he affirms it, and by doing so it becomes not a result of strange forces acting upon him, but a result of his own free choice. But there is also another sense in which the acceptance of necessity constitutes an essential moment for the realization of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is the freedom that arises from reinterpreting our past (with all our more or less unconscious mistakes, faults and misjudgments) as the result of our own (conscious) free will. It is what Zarathustra calls his redemption (Erlösung): ‘To redeem that which has passed away and to re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”— that alone should I call redemption’.84 In more Schellingian terms, the problem Nietzsche is trying to solve here is the mixed feelings we have when regarding our own past: on the one hand, we know we acted freely, as Schelling says in a turn of phrase that will evoke passages quoted already from Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: ‘the essence of man is fundamentally his own act’ (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 1809, FE).85 On the other hand, though, it sometimes feels as if something else had acted through us, as if we had never had a real choice, as if we had been determined from the beginning to be and act as we do: As incomprehensible as this idea may appear to conventional ways of thinking, there is indeed in each man a feeling in accord with it as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time.86

Schelling then gives the example of Judas: That Judas became a betrayer of Christ, neither he nor any creature could change, and nevertheless he betrayed Christ not under compulsion, but willingly and with complete freedom.87

In a sense, Schelling’s interpretation of Judas’ betrayal here is similar to his interpretation of Oedipus’ fate in his Philosophy of Art (1802): the only way in which Judas and Oedipus can affirm their freedom is by recognizing their own deeds, even if these deeds become totally alienating to them; even if, in the case of Judas, the alienation is so strong that he 82 Nietzsche, Z, 135 [KSA 4.199].

83 Camus, MS, 121. A surprisingly similar relation between the figure of the highwayman and the idea of freedom as the affirmation of repetition may also be found in the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s The Highwayman. 84 Nietzsche, Z, 121 [KSA 4.179]. 85 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 50. Further references will be abbreviated FE (i.e. Freedom Essay), followed by page number. SW references will also be given in brackets, in this case: [SW VII, 386]. 86 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 51 [SW VII, 386]. 87 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 51 [SW VII, 386].

312   Katia Hay will have to take his own life. What is interesting about this interpretation is that the process they have to go through in order to maintain and affirm their freedom according to Schelling is practically the same process Nietzsche describes as Zarathustra’s redemption. It is a process of internalizing necessity in such a way that it may be reinterpreted as the fruit of free will. For Schelling, though, this necessity does not come merely from the fact that past actions are irreversible. The necessity or the fatality Schelling refers to is of another order. It is the ‘inner necessity’ that Judas feels at the very moment of his betrayal—as if he could not do otherwise—although he knows that no one else can be held responsible for his actions. Indeed, he decides, and yet it seems as if the decision had been made before he even knew. The way in which Schelling explains the possibility of this form of identity between freedom and necessity (FE)88—which in the end has to do with the problem of determining the extent to which our entire being (i.e. not only our actions, but also our character and our desires) is the result of our free choices—is by supposing that these decisions were made by us with absolute freedom, but at another moment in time before, namely before time, and hence, in a totally pre-conscious and pre-temporal way (which does not mean that they have not marked or do not still mark our consciousness and our whole existence again and again, as if the decisions determining us were always renewed): Man is in the initial creation, as shown, an undecided being—(which might be portrayed mythically as a condition of innocence that precedes this life and as an initial blessedness)— only man himself can decide. But this decision cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time, and hence, together with the first creation [. . .] The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eternity: it also does not temporally precede life but goes through time as an act which is eternal by nature.89

One could argue that Schelling is only creating more problems with this idea of a decision made ‘outside of all time’. But perhaps this is the only way in which a paradox can be approached, namely through a paradox. In this sense, this passage is not so different from Nietzsche’s when he writes in Gay Science §125 that: ‘deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard’ (GS §125).90 In both cases, the acknowledgement of having consciously committed certain actions is always necessarily delayed. But everything depends on this acknowledgement; our freedom depends on it. In both cases freedom (as the possibility of choosing the Good in Schelling or the creation of new values in Nietzsche) is only possible through a process of self-knowledge in which the ‘subject’ of knowledge (such as Oedipus or the ‘men at the market place’) has to recognize himself in the ‘object’ of knowledge (the ‘murderer of Laius’ or the ‘murderers of God’ resp.). Indeed, Schelling is not giving us the ultimate ‘true’ answer to the question about the nature of human freedom, but he is giving us a thought that will enable us to understand that the only way in which we can maintain and affirm our freedom is by imagining that we are in fact the result of our (past) ‘choices’, and hence, that we must accept them and acknowledge them as ours; even if we do 88  ‘[. . .] necessity and freedom are in one another as one being [Ein Wesen] that appears as one or the other only when considered from different sides’ (Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 50 [SW VII, 385]). 89 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 50 [SW VII, 385]. 90 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481].

Existentialism   313 not remember them, even if we could not possibly remember having made them. Our task is to become aware of the ‘decisions’ that constitute us, that is, to become aware of who we are: this is our freedom. Or in Kierkegaard’s terms: ‘The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will, and the more will the more self. Someone who has no will at all is no self. But the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has too’.91 In his lecture on existentialism from 1946, Sartre said that: ‘existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position’.92 In this sense, Nietzsche could be seen as the true predecessor of existentialism. And yet, as we have seen here, there are many ways in which the most existentialist moves in Nietzsche’s philosophy are already present in Kierkegaard and Schelling. The latter are definitely not atheists, but they certainly question the way in which we should think of God. In fact, one of the features these three authors seem to have in common is the urge to rethink some of the concepts that have traditionally been at the centre of philosophical discourses—such as God and freedom—in order to understand them from a totally new perspective, namely from the perspective of existence, of human existence. Freedom is not just an abstract concept, but something we feel we have and lack at the same time. On the other hand, though, it is important to stress the way in which both Schelling and Nietzsche present these thoughts. For Sartre it seems to be unquestionable: man is ‘condemned to be free’,93 and therefore, ‘even if God existed that would make no difference’.94 The problem with this sentence is that it considers that it knows exactly the true conditions of human existence: we are alone and confronted with our absolute freedom. In this respect, both Schelling’s and Nietzsche’s positions are much subtler, for they are always aware of the fact that this way of understanding human existence is the result of a certain interpretation. It is a decision one may make or not, but they never attempt to talk from a standpoint of absolute truth, unless of course veiled (and somehow undermined) under a manifestly mythological language or a figurative character such as Zarathustra. For this and many other reasons (such as the importance of opening up different possibilities for the realization of philosophy), it seems important to confirm that although these authors may have prepared the path for existentialism, their thought does not necessarily end there. On the contrary, in many respects it goes beyond it.

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314   Katia Hay Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness unto Death:  a Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1989 (edition 2004). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus spoke Zarathustra:  a Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness:  An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 72003. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Huis Clos. Introduction and Notes by Keith Gore. London:  Routledge, 1987 (edition 2000). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Sartre, Jean-Paul, J.P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos. Audio-CD 2004. Paris: Gallimard-Emen (this is a recording of the ‘preface parlé’ to a recorded version of the play in 1965). Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, System des transzendentalen Idealismus. In: Sämtliche Werke III, 327–634. K.F.A. Schelling (ed.). Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1856–61. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Die Weltalter. Fragmente. M. Schröter (ed.). Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1966. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft. In Sämtliche Werke IX, 209–53. K. F. A. Schelling (ed.). Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1856–61.

Secondary Texts Blackham, Harold John (1952), Six Existentialist Thinkers. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Jaspers. Marcel. Heidegger. Sartre. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dupré, Louis, ‘The Sickness unto Death: Critique of Modern Age’. In Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 33–52. [First published in: R. Perkins (ed.), The Sickness unto Death. International Kierkegaard Commentary (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 85–106.] Earnshaw, Steven, Existentialism: a Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Franke, William, ‘The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity’, Religion and the Arts, 11(2), 2007, 214–41. Friedman, Maurice, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Father of Atheist Existentialism’, Journal of Existentialism, VI(23), 1966, 269–78. Grøn, Arne, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette Knox. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008. [First published 1994.] Joannis, David Guy, Sartre et le problème de la connaissance. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996.

Existentialism   315 Kaufmann, Walter, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Books, 1956. Leiter, Brian, ‘The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche’. In Brian Leiter and John Richardson (eds.), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 281–321. McBride, William L., ‘Existentialism’. In Constantin V. Boundas, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 415–27. Miles, Thomas, ‘Nietzsche. Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life’. In Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011, 263–99. Nehamas, Alexander, ‘How One Becomes What One Is’. In Charles Guignon (ed.). The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 73–102. [Originally appeared in The Philosophical Review 92, no. 3 (July 1983).] Schacht, Richard, ‘Nietzsche: after the Death of God’. In Steven Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shestov, Lev, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969. [First published 1934.] Solomon, Robert C., ‘A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche’s Affirmative Ethics’. In Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 53–72 [Originally appeared in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16, no. 3 (October 1985).] Solomon, Robert C., ‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: the Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’, International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002, 41–54. Wienand, Isabelle, Significations de la Mort de Dieu chez Nietzsche d’Humain, trop Humain à Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006.

A R E A S OF PH I L O S OPH Y

Chapter 16

Phil osoph y of Natu r e Alison Stone 16.1  Introduction: The Rise of Philosophy of Nature Philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) was a distinctive approach to the study of the natural world which flourished amongst numerous philosophers, scientists, and writers—especially, but not only, German speakers—in the first half of the nineteenth century, before losing popularity later in the century. The general idea of philosophy of nature began to emerge in the later 1790s amongst various post-Kantian and early Romantic thinkers.1 But it was above all the German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. von Schelling who gave this idea its first and most influential articulation in a series of his works from this time. Schelling’s central ideas in these works are that nature is a unified, self-organizing, and organic whole, and that particular natural objects and processes are situated within this whole and must be understood in terms of their place within it. For Schelling, far from organic life being reducible to underlying mechanical interactions amongst units of matter, mechanical processes actually belong within the large-scale organism of the whole of nature. He believed, too, that empirical inquiry should be conducted, and empirical findings interpreted, in light of the a priori insight that nature is a self-organizing whole—so that the study of nature should never be exclusively empirical.

1  For instance, the early German Romantic philosopher-poet Novalis worked on an encyclopedia, the so-called Allgemeine Brouillon, mapping the parallels between different natural and mental phenomena. Composed in 1798–9, this draft is translated as Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon by David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). A major influence on many early contributors to Naturphilosophie was Goethe: Goethe championed empirical investigation of nature, yet he held that we can directly observe the fundamental shaping forms and structures—the Urphänomene—within natural appearances. See his Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 307.

320   Alison Stone On this basis, we can identify the approach distinctive of Naturphilosophie by two fundamental elements. First, in metaphysics, philosophers of nature emphasize that nature is not reducible to the sum-total of the interactions amongst bits of matter in motion. Rather, nature is at a more fundamental level self-organizing, dynamic, creative, vital, organic, and/or a living whole. (Different thinkers highlight different qualities from this list, and interpret these qualities in varying ways.) Second, in epistemology, philosophers of nature take it that insofar as nature has this vital, self-organizing or holistic dimension, it must be understood using tools proper to philosophy as well as those of empirical science. For instance, for Schelling, to comprehend nature as a large-scale organism we must “ascend to philosophical axioms” that we know a priori.2 To comprehend nature we must study it not only empirically but also philosophically—because, whatever exactly philosophy’s methods are taken to be, they are taken to differ from those of empirical science in ways that make them appropriate for comprehending nature as more than merely a mechanical aggregate.3 Schelling’s articulation of this new philosophical approach to nature (which I discuss in section 16.2) helped the approach to take rapid hold in the first decades of the nineteenth century amongst many thinkers, writers, and practicing researchers into nature (Naturforscher). The approach’s supporters included Schelling’s one-time collaborator, G.  W. F.  Hegel, who developed Naturphilosophie in his own direction, stressing that nature is rational (see section 16.3). Even the arch-opponent of German Idealism, Arthur Schopenhauer, elaborated a philosophy of nature, reinterpreting various natural phenomena as manifestations of the ultimate reality of one single purposeless, non-rational, and unsatisfiable cosmic will. Schelling regarded nature as both organizing itself in a rational way and embodying a pure upsurge of creative energy. That combined emphasis upon reason and creative energy fell apart in his successors: Hegel stresses reason against creative energy, whereas Schopenhauer stresses creative energy against reason. In denying that reality and nature are rational, Schopenhauer anticipates the naturalistic, harder-headed outlook on nature that gained ground in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (discussed in section 16.4). The proponents of this outlook endorsed varying combinations of empiricism and mechanistic materialism; amongst them, Naturphilosophie fell out of favor. Nonetheless, significant aspects of Naturphilosophie persisted into the later century—in Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos of 1845–62, for instance. Indeed, there are ways in which philosophy of nature remains relevant today, as I will note in conclusion.

2 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 172. All quotations are from standard English translations when available, sometimes amended without special notice in light of the German originals. 3  This formulation may suggest that philosophy of nature is inherently opposed to naturalism, if naturalism is defined as the view that the methods of philosophical inquiry should be continuous with those of the empirical sciences. But it all depends on how “continuity” is interpreted. For Schelling and Hegel, philosophers of nature should use a priori reasoning, but it can be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sense that the two can work together.

Philosophy of Nature    321

16.2  Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Schelling took the lead in defining the philosophy of nature, in works including the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of 1797 (hereafter Ideas), On the World-Soul of 1798, and the First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature of 1799 (hereafter Outline).4 Schelling was motivated to write these works by problems in both science and philosophy (fields, after all, that were not sharply demarcated in his time). Regarding science, Schelling believed that magnetic, chemical, electrical, and biological processes could not be satisfactorily explained in mechanistic terms, by reduction to underlying mechanical interactions amongst their component parts—as had been the explanatory program of the Enlightenment materialists. Schelling believed that understanding these processes required understanding their connections with one another (connections that he thought had been demonstrated by the phenomenon of galvanism),5 and thus required recognition of the priority of the whole of nature over its parts. In the Ideas, Schelling criticized various mechanistic theories, above all the accounts of universal gravitation and attraction championed by the materialist Georges-Louis le Sage and his followers.6 For le Sage, all bodies are constantly being impinged upon from all sides by a torrent of atomic particles or corpuscles. But when two bodies partially screen one another from these surrounding currents (as if casting a shadow upon one another), an imbalance results in the forces acting on each body, so that they are drawn together as a result. This mechanism is the basis of universal gravitation and of chemical attraction, which le Sage explains from the different degrees to which different sorts of material particle are permeable by the impinging corpuscles (for example, two particles of water or of oil attract one another—unlike oil and water—because they are porous to the same degree).7 Schelling rejected as an arbitrary postulate le Sage’s basic hypothesis of a universal ether composed of atomic particles.8 To Schelling, this was just one instance of the inadequacy of mechanism generally to explain the complex interrelations amongst natural bodies. He therefore sought to provide a non-mechanistic framework within which to make sense of these processes. The particular non-mechanistic framework that Schelling evolved reflected his philosophical concerns. Along with many others at the time, Schelling was dissatisfied with what he saw as the unresolved dualisms in Kant’s philosophy—between intuition and understanding, theoretical and practical reason, and in particular between the freedom of human agents and the causal determination of nature. According to Kant in his

4  Although Schelling continued to write on nature after 1801, he did so within the new framework of his identity-philosophy (from which he later moved away). I regard his 1790s works as giving his “classic” formulations of the project of philosophy of nature, its initial aims and scope. 5  See Schelling, Ideas, p. 269. 6  Le Sage wrote a prize-winning 1758 Essai de chymie méchanique, to which Schelling refers, as to the 1788 essay De l’origine des forces magnétique by le Sage’s disciple Pierre Prévost. See Schelling, Ideas, book II, ch. 3. 7  See Rowlinson, J. S., “Le Sage’s Essai de chymie méchanique,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 57: 1 (2003), pp. 35–45. 8 Schelling, Ideas, p. 161.

322   Alison Stone theoretical philosophy, we are obliged to think of ourselves as free subjects, but we cannot know whether we really are so; equally, we cannot know that we are not. This ignorance created the space for Kant to argue in his Critique of Practical Reason that, given the fact of our subjection to moral obligations, we are justified in assuming (annehmen) that we really are free, rational subjects.9 Under this assumption, which for Kant we must make as a matter of practical necessity, human agents are ultimately separate from nature, as free agents who stand out from the realm of causal determination. Thus Kant maintained in the Introduction to his Critique of Judgment that “an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible . . . just as if they were two different worlds.”10 This gulf left Schelling dissatisfied. On the one hand, we are to assume that we are free; on the other hand, we know that everything in nature is causally determined, including all the movements of our own bodies and all that we do as empirically existing entities. So how can we justifiably believe that we really are free? Schelling reasons that our free agency in the midst of nature is only possible if nature already exhibits a form of freedom that foreshadows human agency. In that case, our belonging to nature will not threaten but, precisely, enable our free agency. The idea that nature exhibits a form of freedom may seem strange, and its meaning is not immediately clear. It is not obvious that there is any nature as a whole, over and above all the myriad particular kinds of natural thing—plants, animals, stones, chemical processes, electrical reactions, and so on. It also seems clear that (except perhaps for some animal species) none of these determine how they act on the basis of rational principles. Yet self-determination from rational principles is the sort of freedom with which Schelling, following Kant, is concerned. This leaves it uncertain in what sense nature can exhibit freedom. Nonetheless, Schelling sets himself to provide a comprehensive account of nature as a realm in which freedom is present in a form that prefigures rational human self-determination—in which “universal life . . . reveals itself in manifold forms, in progressive developments, in gradual approximations to freedom.”11 One might think that this project of understanding nature as a realm of freedom is so unpromising that it is better simply to accept a gulf between two perspectives from which we must look at the world: a practical-moral perspective under which we are free agents, and a theoretical-scientific perspective under which all is causally determined. But for Schelling, this acceptance conflicts with (what Kant himself had recognized to be) a basic requirement of our intellect:  that our knowledge should be systematically ordered and unified.12

9 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), p. 79; Ak. vol. 5, p. 94. ‘Ak’ refers to the Akademie edition pagination corresponding to that of the translations cited from the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. 10 Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790/93), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 14–15; Ak. vol. 5, pp. 175–6). 11 Schelling, Ideas, p. 36. 12  See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 534, A645/B673.

Philosophy of Nature    323 Yet the demand that our knowledge must form a systematically ordered whole need not lead us towards the philosophy of nature. That demand could lead elsewhere—as it did for Fichte, motivating him to reconstruct idealism based on a first principle from which all knowledge could be systematically derived. His principle was that “I am I,” the self knows itself—according to the successive versions of his Wissenschaftslehre of the 1790s. Since Schelling was for a time enamored of Fichte and retained important ideas from him, we must briefly reconsider Fichte’s idealism. For Fichte, the single principle underlying all knowledge is that the self knows itself.13 For in any knowing, the self also implicitly knows itself to be engaged in this knowing, tacitly conceiving itself as the agent doing the knowing. This, for Fichte, is a necessary precondition of all knowledge, and of all conscious experience insofar as in having experience one is in a cognitive state. Moreover, for Fichte, it is only by knowing itself that the self is a self: for a necessary condition of being a self, not an object, is that one be self-conscious or self-knowing. Thus, in knowing itself, the self makes itself into the very self it knows itself to be: it produces (or “posits”, setzt) itself, and it only exists as a self insofar as it continuously does this self-positing. Now, the self cannot know itself in this way, as it must if it is to know anything at all, unless it is able to grasp itself as a finite—determinate and limited—agent.14 So the self can only know itself if it is situated within an outer, surrounding world of objects that limits or checks it. Equally, the self-knowing self is necessarily an agent, so the world must limit its agency but not reduce it to nothing. The self, therefore, must assert its agency against the limits imposed by objects, by striving to transform those objects so that they embody the self’s agency.15 Thus, the self must inhabit a world of objects that it seeks to remodel in its own image—for only on condition of this exercise of practical efficacy is any experience possible. Fichte spelled out the practical consequences in his popular essay The Vocation of Humankind: Nature must gradually enter a condition which . . . keeps its force steady in a definite relation with the power which is destined to control it—the power of man. . . . Cultivated lands shall animate and moderate the inert and hostile atmosphere of primeval forests, deserts, and swamps. . . . nature is to become ever more transparent to us until we can see into its most secret core, and human power . . . shall control it without effort and peacefully maintain any conquest once it is made.16

In sum, Fichte attempted to overcome the Kantian gulf between theoretical and practical reason by reconstructing all knowledge from one principle (I = I) that enshrines the unity of knowledge and practical freedom (I know what I make). Fichte also sought to bring together freedom and nature by maintaining that human freedom is only possible within a natural world that opposes it—but thus also on condition that human agents constantly

13 

See Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (1794), trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), §1. 14 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right (1796–7), trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 18. 15  Foundations of Natural Right, p. 20. 16 Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800), trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 83.

324   Alison Stone strive to remodel the natural world. The insistence that we must practically transform nature is thus integral to Fichte’s philosophy. Troubled by this insistence, Schelling wrote to Fichte in October 1801 that: “It is sufficiently known to me in what small region of consciousness nature must fall according to your concept of it. It has for you no speculative significance at all, only a teleological one.”17 Schelling believes, pace Fichte, that if mind and agency really depend on nature, then this dependency must be understood in non-oppositional terms, such that nature does not merely limit but rather prefigures and enables human agency— thus occupying a very extensive region of consciousness: its entire set of background preconditions. Nevertheless, Schelling retained some extremely important lessons from Fichte. Above all, Schelling maintained the idea that self-knowledge is the paradigm of knowledge. I can know myself, Schelling believes, because in this case knower and known are identical. This gives us the following principle: for me to be able to know something, it must be identical to me.18 I can know nature, then, only if it has an identical structure to that of knowing human subjectivity: “so long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life.”19 Moreover, we can and do know about nature, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in scientific knowledge in the modern era. Since this knowledge is only possible if nature is identical to the knower, it must be the case that nature really does have an identical structure to the knowing subject: “Nature . . . itself . . . must not only express, but realize itself, the laws of our mind.”20 Even if this identity of structure is not immediately apparent, it must really exist. This sets a task for the philosopher of nature: to re-examine scientific findings and bring out the evidence of underlying identity of structure which these findings provide, which will often require re-interpretation of these findings. This line of thought informs Schelling’s Ideas. Surveying the sciences of his time, he concludes from them that all natural forms and processes are constituted by a polar opposition between two forces of attraction and repulsion. He criticizes Newtonian atomism, arguing that even supposedly basic units of matter are “originally a product of [these] opposed forces.”21 So too is the “diversity of matter,” the whole array of complicated forms into which matter is structured. Vast as this array is, there are discernible parallels between all the natural forms—between gravitational attraction, magnetism, and chemical affinity, for example. The parallels do not arise because all these processes take place within the same ether of minute corpuscles, as for le Sage. Rather, for Schelling, the parallels arise because all these processes manifest the same basic structure—opposition between polar forces—at different levels. Nature is composed not from material atoms but polar forces. Methodologically, Schelling does not proceed in the Ideas by stipulating that these polar forces exist and then trying to deduce empirical natural forms from them. Rather, he takes 17  Fichte and Schelling (1800–2), The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence, trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), p. 64. 18 “The first presupposition of all knowledge is that the knower and that which is known are the same”; Schelling, System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular (1804), in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. Dale Snow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 141. 19 Schelling, Ideas, p. 36. 20 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 41–2. 21 Schelling, Ideas, p. 221.

Philosophy of Nature    325 empirical findings as his starting-point and concludes that, to understand these findings adequately, we must recognize that polar forces pervade nature. Schelling is not advancing a purely speculative account of nature, but setting out an interpretive framework in which to make sense of empirical findings. Insofar as these findings can be made sense of within his framework (better sense, he hopes, than rival mechanistic frameworks permit), this justifies the overall view that polar forces structure the natural world. Now, this scientific evidence of polarity also provides evidence that nature has the same structure as subjectivity—for subjectivity, Schelling argues, exhibits a version of the polarity of attraction and repulsion.22 The subject first expands outwards to know about objects in the world outside it. Yet in doing so, the subject must also tacitly know itself as the one doing the knowing. To that extent, the subject equally pulls back inwards upon itself. When contemporary science shows that nature is structured by polar forces, then, it equally shows that nature observes the same polarity as the subject does. Nature shares the structure of the mind, which confirms in turn that we can know nature as it really, objectively, is: “The system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind.”23 What Schelling had begun to believe in the Ideas, though, was not only that nature is composed of polar forces, but also that there are manifold levels of nature each embodying a particular level of realization of these two forces. Their polarity at one level gives us gravitation, at the next level magnetism, then electrical affinity, and so on. Thus, nature is a hierarchy in which its more developed manifestations exhibit more dynamic antagonism between their component forces (as opposed to mechanical inertia). Apparently, then, nature is composed of one single fundamental structure—the interdependence of opposed forces—that elaborates itself at different levels of realization. By implication, nature is one vast self-organizing whole—as Schelling concluded in his next work, On the World-Soul of 1798. For it is the nature of an organism—as Schelling took from Kant—to organize itself, on the basis of its original concept or principle, into a whole ensemble of differentiated yet interlocking members that collectively realize that concept. Insofar as nature organizes itself, it exists as a whole over and above its parts—that is, the various everyday natural things with which we are familiar in experience. Hence Schelling claims that nature as a whole exhibits freedom, ordering itself in line with its concept in a way that approximates to human self-determination.24

22 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 176–7. 24 

23 Schelling, Ideas, p. 30.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argued that organisms must be understood not exclusively mechanistically but as if they were purposive wholes, in which the internal purpose (or plan or principle) of the whole, which specifies its functions, explains why all its parts arise and interconnect as they do. He says that this purpose must be thought of as analogous to a concept (Begriff ), yet cannot really be a concept because natural things do not have intentions (Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 263–4, Ak. vol. 5, pp. 383–4). Schelling goes further: “Every organic product carries the ground of its existence in itself . . . Thus a concept lies at the basis of every organization, for where there is a necessary relation of the whole to the part and of the part to the whole, there is concept. But this concept lives in the organization itself . . . [which] organizes itself, unlike an art-work” (Ideas, p. 31). But whereas for Kant we cannot know whether or not organisms really are self-organizing, for Schelling organisms, including the organism of the whole of nature, really organize themselves, and we can know this. Although they do not organize themselves intentionally, it is concepts that direct their organization: that is, non-material plans.

326   Alison Stone Schelling re-organized his approach to nature once again in his Outline. This time, he argues on a priori grounds that nature must originally be pure productive activity—it must be so if any natural items are to come to exist, to be produced, at all. To get from this pure productivity to any determinate natural objects, productive force must limit or fixate itself to constitute these things.25 This is only possible if productivity is limited by an opposing force that inhibits it; otherwise pure productivity would “dissipate itself at infinite speed.”26 To use Schelling’s own analogy, a river only forms eddies when its flow encounters resistance. Necessarily, then, all natural forms are composed from varying proportions of productive and inhibiting force. A whole gamut of natural forms then arises, because productive force always bursts beyond any form in which it becomes confined. The outcome is, again, that nature is a hierarchy, “a dynamically graded series [Reihe] of stages in nature.”27 Since productive force reasserts itself more forcefully each time it bursts beyond its former boundaries, natural forms arise in which productivity increasingly prevails over inhibition, which therefore are increasingly dynamic and alive. At the highest level of this hierarchy, productive force passes over into human agency: the highest level of nature is simultaneously the lowest level of mind. The overall vision that emerges from these works by Schelling is that nature is an organic, self-organizing whole. Nature organizes itself by dividing itself into polar forces that interact antagonistically to produce a hierarchy of kinds of natural product. Although Schelling now (in the Outline) advances his idea of these opposed forces on a priori grounds, he does not attempt to deduce from this idea what natural forms exist. Rather, he uses this a priori idea as a basis for reviewing and reinterpreting scientific findings. Inasmuch as this idea enables him to reinterpret scientific findings so that they make good sense and cohere as a whole, this provides further, empirical warrant for his a priori claims. Reciprocally, his re-interpretation of scientific findings gives them further non-empirical justification:  a priori and empirical considerations thus work together.28 In this as in other respects, there is a marked optimism in Schelling’s approach to nature. We can understand nature, and nature in itself is such that we can understand it. Because “the system of nature is the system of our mind” we find ourselves everywhere in nature—we are at home in it. And nature makes possible our own freedom: although we depend on nature, this dependency is the source of our very capacity for rational self-determination. This optimism ref lects the way that Schelling regards nature as at once energetically creative and rational. Because it is structured by polar forces (creative energies), nature shares the (rational) structure of the human mind, so that we can know it. And in structuring itself into polar forces, nature is doing what it rationally must do to realize its purpose—which is to be productive. Nature thus organizes itself in a way that is at once rational and embodies productive energy. This emphasis that nature is rational was taken further by Hegel.

25 Schelling, First Outline (1799), trans. Keith R. Petersen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 32. 26 

Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 36. 28 Schelling, First Outline, pp. 198–9.

27 Schelling, First Outline, p. 141.

Philosophy of Nature    327

16.3  Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature Hegel’s mature, definitive view of the natural world is presented in his Philosophy of Nature. This is the middle volume of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, published in outline first in 1817 then, with revisions, in 1827 and 1830. Hegel’s philosophy of nature—like Schelling’s—has two fundamental elements, epistemological and metaphysical. Epistemologically, Hegel maintains that the philosopher of nature must take up empirical scientific findings and re-establish them on an a priori basis. In its “origin and formation,” he says, philosophy of nature depends upon empirical science, but it then reconstructs scientific findings on the new basis of “the necessity of the concept”: The philosophy of nature takes up the material which physics has prepared for it from experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstitutes it, without putting experience as its final justification [Bewährung]. Physics must therefore work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter can translate into the concept the abstract [verständige] universal transmitted to it, by showing how this universal, as an intrinsically necessary whole, proceeds from the concept.29

What science transmits to philosophy is the “abstract universal”: by this, Hegel means a scientific account of some universal form, such as a natural kind or a natural law underlying appearances. Here Hegel explicitly denies that science is a purely empirical discipline, insisting that theory and conceptualization always inform scientific experimentation and observation.30 Philosophers of nature “take up” each natural form already theorized by scientists and “reconstitute” these forms into an “intrinsically necessary whole.” That is, philosophers study how each of these natural forms derives from (“proceeds from,” hervorgeht) the others and fits with them into an organized whole. By showing how each natural form derives from the others, philosophers are reconstructing the necessity of these forms on the basis of the concept—that is, on the basis of a priori reasoning. By this means, scientific findings about these forms receive further non-empirical justification. The method of philosophy of nature, then, is to subject scientific accounts of natural forms to a rational reconstruction. In the course of this reconstruction, scientific accounts will often need to be re-interpreted. For just as science always involves theory, so it always involves metaphysical assumptions:  “the diamond-net into which we bring everything to make it intelligible.”31 But the assumptions adopted by scientists may well be inadequate: scientists regularly espouse mechanistic materialism, for instance. Often, then, the philosopher must provide a more satisfactory re-interpretation of nature as scientists have described it, informed by the philosopher’s more adequate metaphysics. And when there

29 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (1830), trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), §246A; vol. 1, p. 201. In references to Hegel, paragraph number (when applicable) precedes volume and page number; A indicates an addition, R a remark. 30 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, p. 193. 31 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §246A; vol. 1, p. 202.

328   Alison Stone are scientific claims that do not admit of such re-interpretation, such as (Hegel thinks) Newton’s theory of color, they just have to be discarded. But in what sense might natural forms derive from one another? To understand this, we must look at the actual metaphysics of the natural world that Hegel puts forward based on his reconstruction of the science of his time. Nature, he writes, comprises a “series of stages” or Stufengang,32 chiefly three: mechanical, physical, and organic. In the first, mechanical stage, nature exists in the guise of units of matter that have little or no unifying organization. The reigning principle is that of Außereinander, being-outside-one-another:  matter as bare partes extra partes.33 During the mechanical stage, though, nature advances from its original existence as space—sheer undifferentiated extension—to existence as increasingly structured and interrelated sets of material bodies (ultimately in the guise of the bodies composing the solar system). In the second, physical stage, Hegel finds material bodies that are partly, but still not fully, integrated with one another. They are related to one another and affected by these relations, but still not completely so. For Hegel this is the hallmark of magnetism, electricity, and above all chemistry, in which distinct substances react and transform one another, but without becoming bound together into a permanently self-renewing whole. This is only achieved in organic life, nature’s third stage. Animals, plants and even the entire earth as a system of interacting elements all realize the inherent nature of an organism to varying degrees, namely to have material parts that are as they are entirely because of their places within the organic whole. A heart, for instance, is as it is wholly because of its function in pumping the blood. The material parts or members (Glieder) of organisms are thus shaped by their unifying forms or concepts. As Schelling did, Hegel relies here on Kant’s view that in an organism the plan—or purpose or concept—of the whole must be regarded as organizing and assigning roles to all the material parts. Now, for Hegel, the foregoing succession of natural stages constitutes a progression (Fortbildung)—not in time, but a logical progression.34 Organisms are more advanced than chemical processes and the latter in turn than electrical processes (and so on), because by virtue of their internal structure organisms resolve tensions (or contradictions) within other—less advanced—natural forms. Chemical bodies, specifically, are partly related together and partly independent of one another, thereby embodying a kind of tension. Organisms avoid this tension by having material parts that are fully shaped by the whole. Nature thus exhibits a progression in that each of its forms resolves tensions within other forms, the most advanced forms being those that maximally resolve all the preceding tensions. The philosopher does not identify these tensions and their resolutions on a purely speculative basis. He or she first examines the accounts of natural forms provided by scientists, then discerns the tensions within these forms so described, and on this basis rearranges these forms into a sequence from most to least tension-ridden. By doing so, the philosopher of nature is simultaneously deriving each form from its predecessor by a priori reasoning: having first learnt about the structure of organisms from scientists, he or she can

32 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §251; vol. 1, p. 216. 33 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §252; vol. 1, p. 217.

34 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §249R; vol. 1, p. 212.

Philosophy of Nature    329 now re-establish on a priori grounds that organisms must exist in this form to resolve the tension within chemical processes. But why should anyone think that tensions within given natural forms must be resolved, so that other natural forms must exist that resolve them? Like Schelling, Hegel takes it that we can know about nature only on condition that nature exhibits a form of rationality. Unless nature was rational, we could not know about it using reason: nature would not be adapted to the human intellect and would defy comprehension. To be sure, natural beings do not engage in conscious reasoning or entertain rational thoughts. Nonetheless, for Hegel, nature has an overall rational organization that foreshadows the rational order that the conscious human mind gives to itself. Moreover, this a priori insight that nature must be rational is confirmed by scientific findings about the character of organisms, chemical processes, electrical interactions, and so on. These findings show that organisms are such that they resolve the tensions within chemical processes, that chemical processes are such that they resolve the tensions within electrical processes, and so on. This can only be possible if nature has some kind of inner drive to resolve tensions within it—tensions that are contra-rational, so that nature is acting rationally in structuring itself so as to reduce and ultimately overcome these tensions. Hegel thus regards nature as a rationally organized realm in which matter gradually becomes shaped and organized by “the concept”, in the process assuming organic form. In that nature exhibits this progression towards organism, all natural forms approximate to organic status to varying degrees (down to a vanishingly low degree in mechanism). Moreover, nature is also organic in that it is a self-organizing whole, the stages of which are rationally ordered and are as they are because of their places within the whole.35 Hegel retains much of the basic structure that Schelling imparted to Naturphilosophie. Hegel, too, reinterprets scientific findings on an a priori basis and regards nature as a self-organizing whole such that it prefigures the human mind and can be known by us. However, the concept of force that was so central for Schelling plays no role in Hegel’s account of nature. For Hegel, instead, reason is the crucial notion: nature organizes itself on the basis of its internal, albeit implicit and non-conscious, rationality. Nature is driven to restructure and reshape itself again and again not because it consists in productive force but just because it is rational, so that Hegel considers any appeal to productive force in the explanation of natural organization to be redundant.

16.4  The Decline and Survival of Philosophy of Nature Working out his ideas at very much the same time as Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer took his philosophy of nature in the reverse direction to that of Hegel, emphasizing the non-rational will in nature. Schopenhauer did so in The World as Will and Representation of 1818/1844 and his 1836 essay On the Will in Nature. Despite his anti-rationalist emphasis on the will

35 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §251; vol. 1, p. 216.

330   Alison Stone and his hostility to German Idealism generally, Schopenhauer in fact continues the basic project of philosophy of nature, both in epistemology and in metaphysics. In epistemology, Schopenhauer believes that we can achieve philosophical insight into the fundamental metaphysical reality of one single vast will by extrapolating from my awareness of the primary reality of will in my own case. This insight allows us not merely to infer that the ultimate reality of all natural beings must be will but actually to directly apprehend this reality of will within the phenomena. Some “especially acute” empirical scientists have apprehended this too—and done so in their own terms, Schopenhauer maintains, without his needing to “twist and strain” scientific findings to adapt them to his metaphysics, as he claims other Naturphilosophen (Schelling, Hegel) have done.36 These scientists have recognized the will by observation, as Schopenhauer has on a priori grounds: two groups of investigators meeting from opposite directions.37 In metaphysics, Schopenhauer vehemently opposes “crude materialism,”38 denying that nature is reducible to a mechanical aggregate of causally interacting spatio-temporal objects. To be sure, nature so appears to us given our mode of representation. But if we have grasped the reality of will—either explicitly, by way of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, or implicitly, if we are acute Naturforscher—then we can also recognize this reality underlying nature’s phenomena. In all organic nature, we can observe striving (to survive, to reproduce; to eat, digest, excrete), growth, formation. Even in non-organic processes we can observe processes of formation (as in crystallization), magnetic and electrical attraction, movement under the action of forces: all the forces operative here are simply the single cosmic will.39 That is, all these beings and their particular strivings or movements are merely individualized ways that the will appears to us. Thus, once we grasp that nature is will, what initially appeared as a mere mechanical aggregate shows itself to be quite different—the plural and antagonistic appearance of one ever-dynamic will: “the will . . . fills every thing and manifests itself immediately in each—thus showing each thing to be its phenomenon.”40 The will manifested in natural things is non-rational, for Schopenhauer. It has no consciousness and no goal and can find no satisfaction; intellect is only its subordinate tool. The will is an empty, endless striving, so that nature is not a purposive whole but a realm of unceasing conflict and suffering. For Schelling, nature was dynamic and rational: to recognize nature’s self-organizing power was to recognize a forerunner of human reason and autonomy, and thereby to feel at home in a rational world. For Schopenhauer, the study of nature in its dynamism only confirms the truth of pessimism, that the world has no meaning. His view thus contributed to a historical process that Odo Marquard calls the “disenchantment of Romantic nature,” in which nature progressively lost “the attributes of harmony . . . and purposiveness” over the nineteenth century.41 36 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, in Two Essays, trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand (London: Bell

& Sons, 1889), p. 216. 37 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 219. 38 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 1, p. 123. 39 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, pp. 117–19. 40 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 258. 41  Odo Marquard, quoted in Günter Gödde, “The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century

Philosophy of Nature    331 So far I  have discussed only philosophers, but in the early nineteenth century Naturphilosophie was popular with many practicing scientists. Its partisans included Hans Christian Oersted and Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who respectively discovered electromagnetism and electrochemistry. They made these discoveries by starting from theoretical assumptions drawn from Naturphilosophie. The idea that different natural processes manifest a common structure at varying levels led Oersted, Ritter, and others to look for and find parallels and connections amongst electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. Indeed, Thomas Kuhn argued that the same philosophical belief in the fundamental unity of nature contributed to the simultaneous discovery of energy conservation by a number of nineteenth-century scientists.42 Despite these ways that Naturphilosophie helped to advance scientific knowledge in the early nineteenth century, it was above all advances in science that discredited Naturphilosophie in many eyes. For as the nineteenth century unfolded, scientists gradually found ways to provide a unified mechanistic explanation of hitherto puzzling chemical, electrical, magnetic, and biological processes. Moreover, these advances in understanding were often thought to be due to a renewed adherence to the methods of observation and experiment. The scientific-philosophical outlook that became increasingly dominant from the mid-century onwards thus combined empiricist method with mechanistic materialism. In many ways, this outlook was the polar opposite of Naturphilosophie. Its advocates insisted both that inquiry into nature must be wholly or primarily empirical, eschewing any speculative philosophical contribution, and that nature ultimately consists of units of matter in motion and causal interaction. Hermann von Helmholtz, for example—the leading scientist in later-nineteenth-century Germany—insisted that science must be based on experiment, observation, and induction 43 and that nature is to be explained by being reduced to interacting units of matter.44 In this context Naturphilosophie was increasingly viewed as having obstructed and retarded scientific inquiry—even as having been “the pestilence and black death of the century,” according to the influential chemist Justus Liebig.45 Supposedly, Naturphilosophie had had such disastrous effects because its entire program rested upon a basic mistake. Its practitioners had abandoned empirical method and the mechanistic paradigm rather than

Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 209. The source of the quotation is Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Dinter, 1987), p. 199. 42  Kuhn, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957). 43  See David Cahan, “Helmholtz and the Civilizing Power of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 564–5. 44  In 1847 in Über die Erhaltung der Kraft, Helmholtz wrote: “The phenomena of nature are to be reduced to movements of bits of matter with unalterable moving forces that depend only on their spatial relations”; quoted in Michael Heidelberger, “Force, Law, and Experiment: The Evolution of Helmholtz’s Philosophy of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Cahan, p. 464. 45  Liebig, quoted in Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 507. The source of the quotation is Liebig, Reden und Abhandlungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1874), p. 24.

332   Alison Stone patiently working out how to explain electricity, chemistry, life, and so on within empirical and mechanistic terms. An 1843 attack on Schelling and Hegel by Matthias Jakob Schleiden represented the rising line of thought. For Schleiden, the only legitimate scientific method is to start with exact observation then infer to the laws that best explain the observed facts; there is no place for philosophical speculation. Those who indulge in it—Schelling, Hegel—try to deduce knowledge of nature a priori and inevitably traduce many empirical facts in the process.46 In reality, contra Schleiden, Schelling and Hegel thought that the empirical and the a priori could work together. But for Schleiden and others they could not, and a priori speculation could only ever damage scientific inquiry. From this perspective, Schleiden and others could not even see that Schelling and Hegel adopted a mixed approach, and wrongly assumed that their method was purely a priori. Despite these criticisms of Naturphilosophie, significant residues of it persisted throughout the nineteenth century—even in some German scientists. So, although the union of idealist philosophy and a posteriori enquiry into nature did not endure . . . [we must] get this fact into focus. Romantic ideas about nature did not disappear or lose currency abruptly or at any clearly determinable point. They remained strongly influential, to such an extent that [in] many nineteenth-century figures—Alexander von Humboldt, Theodor Fechner and Haeckel provide examples—the elements of their thought that we would consider genuinely “scientific” join inseparably with those that we would call “romantic.”47

Consider Humboldt, the leading German scientist of the first half of the nineteenth century. In his multi-volume Kosmos, he offered a total picture (or “general view,” generelle Ansicht) of nature and the overall development of scientific knowledge. In his view, nature was no mere aggregate but, precisely, a “cosmos”—an ordered, harmonious arrangement. This position reflected Humboldt’s overall approach to inquiry into nature. Humboldt sought to avoid what he called “vicious empiricism” by conducting his empirical investigations—measuring and categorizing geological and geographical phenomena, travelling the globe to document its climatic, mineral, botanical, and other variations—informed by a “higher standpoint.”48 This standpoint is that of aesthetic experience, in which we apprehend nature as a whole the parts of which interconnect completely. From this aesthetic standpoint “all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one single impulse.”49 Beginning with an overall aesthetic view, we descend to detailed empirical research that gives definiteness and precision to what we merely intimate (ahnen) aesthetically. We then rise back, by putting together the results of various branches of research, to a fully elaborated version of our original intuition.50 46 

Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Schellings und Hegels Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft (1843), ed. Olaf Breidbach (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1988), p. 51. 47  Sebastian Gardner, “Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Stone, p. 92. 48 Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, modern reprint of the 1849 edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 36. 49 Humboldt, Cosmos, p. 36. 50 Humboldt, Cosmos, p. 17. On Humboldt’s view of nature, see also Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, “Saving Nature from Vicious Empiricism: Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Romantic’ Science,” in Das neue Licht der Romantik, ed. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert and Bärbel Frischmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

Philosophy of Nature    333 Here Humboldt remained largely faithful to the program of Romantic science as Robert Richards interprets it.51 In this program, empirical investigation is informed and guided from the outset by aesthetic intuition of the whole in which the empirical particulars are located; study of the particulars then rounds out our original intuition. Thus the aim of Romantic science, as of philosophy of nature, was to contextualize scientific detail within a broader insight into the character of nature as a whole. Romantic science and philosophy of nature may seem to differ in that the former gained its insight into the unity of nature aesthetically, the latter philosophically. But the divide was not sharp. For Schelling, philosophical reason recaptures the unity of intuition at a higher, more articulated level; whilst for scientists such as Humboldt, aesthetic experience is already implicitly rational: “Nature considered rationally, . . . is a unity in diversity of phenomena, . . . one great whole animated by the breath of life.”52 Aesthetic experience, in fact, provides one source of rational insight into the unity of nature, so that Romantic science is continuous with philosophy of nature.53 Advancing to the twentieth century, Naturphilosophie still did not die out. To take just one example, French this time, Henri Bergson was a paradigmatic philosopher of nature. Rejecting mechanistic materialism, Bergson thought that nature was unified by its élan vital: the spontaneous and unpredictable creativity of matter itself, in virtue of which matter grows, unfolds, and organizes itself in ever-evolving ways. For Bergson, this élan can only be grasped in intuition, in the light of which scientific accounts of natural forms and phenomena must be reinterpreted—as he did in his 1907 work Creative Evolution. Nevertheless, the persistence of Naturphilosophie throughout the nineteenth century and in some twentieth-century figures is only one qualifying factor in the broader historical picture:  that of its long-term decline as a living research program. This decline might suggest that the ideas of philosophers of nature can only hold historical interest for us today, and can no longer be taken seriously. That verdict would be premature. The last 20 years have witnessed significant regrowth of interest in Naturphilosophie, prompted especially by the spread of environmental problems. Plausibly, one source of these problems is that we moderns are prone to adopt a mistaken image of ourselves as separate from, rather than embedded in and dependent upon, nature. Plausibly, too, we have regularly failed to appreciate the ways in which nature is an interconnected whole, such that events affecting one part of it (for example, emissions of chemicals into the atmosphere in one place) have ramifications for others (when these chemicals react with atmospheric components and climatic patterns to generate acid rain in another place). Yet philosophers of nature in their various ways regard nature as an interconnected whole: as one organism or cosmos (Schelling, Humboldt) or as united in its rationality or will or élan vital (Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson). In their several ways, too, these philosophers regard human beings as an outgrowth of nature: as a realization of self-organizing or rational nature, or a manifestation of the omnipresent will. 51 Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 52 Humboldt, Cosmos, pp. 2–3. 53  Consequently, Humboldt was willing to affiliate himself to philosophy of nature, in a letter of 1836 (see Humboldt, Cosmos, p. xvi), provided that this meant arranging data in light of rational ideas and not vainly trying to deduce data from ideas.

334   Alison Stone Philosophy of nature can thus give us an improved appreciation both of how nature is an interconnected whole and of the dependent place that we occupy within this whole— an appreciation that can help to motivate us to practice more environmentally sustainable ways of life. Old as many of the principal writings in the tradition of philosophy of nature are, then, they still address contemporary problems. This makes it important for us to revisit and revitalize the tradition of Naturphilosophie in the present day.

Bibliography Beiser, Frederick, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1960). Bowie, Andrew, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993). Cahan, David, “Helmholtz and the Civilizing Power of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). Fichte, J.  G., The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Fichte, J. G., The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Fichte, J.  G., Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). Fichte, J.  G., and Schelling, F.  W. J., The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence, trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012). Gardner, Sebastian, “Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Gödde, Günter, “The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Goethe, J. W. von, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Nature, trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). Heidelberger, Michael, “Force, Law, and Experiment: The Evolution of Helmholtz’s Philosophy of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). Humboldt, Alexander von, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, modern reprint of the 1849 edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Kuhn, Thomas, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).

Philosophy of Nature    335 Liebig, Justus von, Reden und Abhandlungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1874). Marquard, Odo, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Dinter, 1987). Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth, “Saving Nature from Vicious Empiricism: Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Romantic’ Science,” in Das neue Licht der Romantik, ed. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert and Bärbel Frischmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009). Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). Richards, Robert J., The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Rowlinson, J. S., “Le Sage’s Essai de chymie méchanique,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 57: 1 (2003): 35–45. Schelling, F. W. J., Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Schelling, F. W. J., Von der Weltseele—Eine Hypothese der Höhern Physik zur Erklärung des Allgemeinen Organismus, ed. Jörg Jantzen with Thomas Kisser, in Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe Reihe 1: Werke, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), pp. 62–433. Schelling, F. W. J., First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Petersen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004). Schelling, F. W. J., System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. Dale Snow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, Schellings und Hegels Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. Olaf Breidbach (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1988). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966). Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Will in Nature, in Two Essays, trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand (London: Bell & Sons, 1889).

Chapter 17

Philosoph y of Science Frederick Gregory 17.1 Introduction To attempt a summary of the philosophy of science in nineteenth-century Germany presents challenges on several fronts. We can meet one at the very outset by declaring that in what follows we are referring to the philosophy of natural science, not science in the general sense of Wissenschaft that many nineteenth-century Germans would have assumed. Even then, however, we must be careful since what a modern reader understands by natural science only emerged after the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany. It was only then that a practitioner of natural science, a Naturwissenschaftler, was distinguished from a general investigator of nature, a Naturforscher. And it was only in the 1820s when the empirical investigation of nature sufficiently identified with an experimental methodology that Naturwissenschaft was able to separate for most from the larger enterprise of nature philosophy, Naturphilosophie, that had been in vogue since the beginning of the century. As Paul Ziche has noted,1 the term Wissenschaftstheorie was new when Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald raised systematic questions about the foundation of scientific ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Mach, in fact, is sometimes credited with originating the specific discipline of philosophy of science.2 Since philosophy of science in the twenty-first century has a specific connotation that does not fit most of the nineteenth, the choice of subject matter in this chapter has been dictated by the philosophical issues that were of primary concern to those living in the nineteenth century. They involve matters such as the nature of scientific theory and explanation, the nature and role of induction, the philosophy of organism, and the relationships among science, philosophy, and worldview. Our tour through the nineteenth century begins, then, in the more philosophical context that dominated the early decades. 1  Paul Ziche, “Monist Philosophy of Science: Between Worldview and Scientific Meta-reflection,” in Todd Weir ed., Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), pp. 161–2. 2  Thomas S. Szasz, Introduction to Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, 5th ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), p. ix.

Philosophy of Science    337

17.2  The Intellectual Heritage of Immanuel Kant The conception of scientific explanation that emerged from Kant’s critiques depended on judgment—the joining together of the particulars of sense experience. There were two kinds of judgment, determinative and reflective. Determinative judgment was dependent on what Kant called categories of the understanding. Categories such as substance and causality, for example, exist prior to the exercise of determinative judgment, they therefore determine or constitute how we put the particulars of sense experience together even though they do not generate the content of our experience. Kant inferred from this analysis that scientific explanation should be equated with causal accounts, especially as found in causal mechanisms like those of Newtonian science that could be captured in mathematical analysis. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 Kant wrote that natural science was only genuine (eigentliche) science to the extent that a description of nature was expressed mathematically.3 Reflective judgment compares given ideas with others when no general category is present. It does not, therefore, have to do directly with objects. It comes into play in science when, in connection with our experience, we encounter an idea that, because it is not an object that concepts can determine, stands outside the causal regularity of determinative judgment. An idea like “nature always follows the shortest path” may have an impact on our experience of nature, it may regulate that experience, but it does not come from the objects of nature. According to Kant, the apparently purposive nature of living things is another such idea. Because living things supplied their own purpose and did not receive it from outside themselves, the interaction of their parts involved a more complex causality than the linear causality of simple mechanisms. This because the parts and the whole of organism are bound together in such a way that, as Kant wrote in 1790, “they are mutually cause and effect of their form.”4 In organisms there is feedback among the parts: the heart pumps the blood that is needed by the heart to pump the blood. The usual kind of linear mechanical explanation that describes the motion of planets could not hope to capture the teleological nature of organisms. According to Kant, we can treat organisms as if they were being guided by special purposive forces, but when we do so such forces result from regulative, not constituent judgments like those at work in the causal explanations of physics. Hence we cannot say that such purposive forces actually exist, and there can never be a unified science that comprises both the physical and biological realms. There were a few fundamental implications of Kant’s view that would set the tone for philosophy of science in Germany for many years thereafter. First, Kant was essentially arguing that our use of reason in understanding the world stacks the deck, so to speak. For 3  Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, in Ernst Cassirer ed., Immanuel Kant’s Werke (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), IV, p. 372. 4  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften ed., Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1908), V, p. 373.

338   Frederick Gregory example, we cannot help but see things in three dimensions and in causal relationships. But this does not, in his view, mean that the world really exists in three dimensions or as causally connected. In the first edition of his famous Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 Kant wrote that “the understanding is not merely a capacity to give rules to itself by comparing appearances: it is itself the lawgiver for nature (Gesetzgebung für die Natur).”5 We apprehend the world for us, but we do not know what is like in itself (an sich). For many who came after him, Kant seemed to be saying that while we may be able to find regularities in nature that are useful to us, we can never discover the real truth of nature. Another important component of the Kantian legacy was his understanding of what he called genuine (eigentliche) science. Disciplines like chemistry and natural history, which could not be expressed through mathematically expressed mechanical laws, were categorized as merely empirical, not genuine sciences. As we have already noted, there could also be no genuine science of biology.

17.3  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Naturphilosophie This fracturing of our knowledge of the natural world into accessible and inaccessible realms and the glorification of causal-mechanical Newtonian science was unacceptable to the young Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854). Reared on Kant’s thought, Schelling concluded that his predecessor had made a fundamental error: he had assumed that the natural world must be regarded as mechanism when it should be seen as organism. This was perhaps due to Kant’s depicting the world from the vantage point of someone standing outside it. For Schelling organism was primary, mechanism secondary, and we know living things because we are living things.6 Our knowledge of living things is not confined to the laws of cause and effect that merely describe. Schelling set out to construct a view of nature that not only reflected nature’s organic essence but also healed the breach Kant had erected between things-in-themselves and things as we know them. This broad program for his understanding of nature became known as nature philosophy (Naturphilosophie) and it held that nature was an organized whole that could be understood by human reason. To understand the whole one had to acknowledge that nature as organism possessed qualities beyond the merely physical. Nature was imbued with moral and aesthetic dimensions as well. This of course meant that natural philosophers would have to broaden the vision of their enterprise, something that some did not wish to do. As a consequence of the broad systematic approach Schelling took to natural science he has often been understood, in his own day as well as in later years, to have spurned the

5  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften ed., Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1903), IV, p. 93. 6  Some have argued that in notes and drafts written late in his life but never published while he was alive Kant changed his earlier position to one closer to that given here by Schelling. Cf. Reinhard Löw, Philosophie des Lebendigen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980).

Philosophy of Science    339 empirical side of natural science in favor of deducing its principles transcendentally. In fact Schelling revered the empirical investigation of nature. In an introduction to a sketch of his system of nature philosophy from 1799 he made clear his awareness of the need for empirical verification that everything in nature was necessary. One counterexample, he said, was sufficient to destroy this assertion. He corrected the misunderstanding of some that nature philosophy was a purely deductive, armchair enterprise and in the process revealed his debt to Kant even as he attempted to move beyond him: The assertion that natural science must be able to deduce all its principles a priori is in a measure understood to mean that natural science must dispense with all experience, and, without any intervention of experience, be able to spin all its principles out of itself, an affirmation so absurd that the very objections to it deserve pity. Not only do we know this or that through experience, but we originally know nothing at all except through experience, and by means of experience, and in this sense the whole of our knowledge consists of the data of experience.7

Schelling’s statement here brings into focus a central problem in philosophy of science with which German thinkers would struggle throughout the century, the problem of induction. Once the data of experience have been gathered, how does the natural philosopher then proceed to gather them together into a law of nature and what is the status of such laws? Schelling declared that the data can become principles, even a priori principles, but he did not tell us exactly how they are to be formulated. He merely says that the principles are justified by our consciousness of them as necessary. At other points he refers to a capacity of the human mind, intellectual intuition, as the means by which our awareness of them as necessary is achieved. Intellectual intuition also bridges the gap Kant had created between our knowledge of things and things in themselves. Kant had, of course, also appealed to the necessity of the results of his critique of reason, but for him intuition always had reference to objects of the senses; hence he specifically rejected the possibility of an intellectual intuition. By restricting intuition to the realm of the senses, Kant saw no way in which we could ascend from our knowledge of things to things as they are in themselves. But, other than noting the limitations of induction, he never specifically developed the challenge induction posed for the philosopher of science.

17.4  Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Extension of Kant Schelling’s embrace of intellectual intuition was also anathema to the neo-Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843). Fries was initially drawn to Schelling as someone who, as he put it, was among the first to attempt to link philosophy of nature to the experimental sciences, a task he saw wanting in Kant. He eventually became a critic of Schelling and of Naturphilosophie, but early in his career he credited Schelling for insisting, in 7  Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, in F. W. J. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta’scher Verlag, 1858), II, p. 278.

340   Frederick Gregory opposition to Kant, that all of nature must be regarded as a unified whole. As a consequence Fries took up the challenge of providing a corrective to Kant’s exclusion of organism from genuine science while remaining true to Kantian principles. He attempted to bring sciences like chemistry, for Kant a merely empirical science, into the fold of genuine sciences by developing a stoichiometric analysis of chemical force. His attempt to develop chemistry as a mechanical science failed, as did all efforts at the time to base chemical science on the mathematization of short-range chemical forces.8 Fries also developed an elaborate new approach to organism that, unlike Schelling’s, kept it within the closed system of the material view of the world of external physics. To accomplish this he characterized organism in terms of cyclical motions that could be described using the mathematical descriptions of Newtonian science. His attempt to create a mechanical system for chemistry and his philosophy of organism resonated among a few later German thinkers.9 Fries recognized the importance of Schelling’s focus on induction and initially believed that Schelling had set out to illustrate and justify the role of induction in natural science. But he soon came to the conclusion that Schelling’s intent lay elsewhere and that his drawing of attention to induction was merely incidental. In his 1808 New Critique of Reason he explored for himself what was involved in a philosophy of induction because he had come to suspect there was a rational means through which the leading laws of natural science could be discovered. He did not abandon the Kantian conviction that the goal of a philosophy of nature lay in the grounding of mathematically expressed principles, thereby imparting necessity to them. But he did think that one might be able to arrive at, or as he said “divine” (erraten), such principles with the help of regulative means.10 In pursuit of working all of this out Fries revealed his awareness of the challenge he had set for himself. It might be conceivable that one could identify what he called heuristic maxims that would enable one to divine general laws. But he did not say specifically how this was to be done. Already in a work of 1803 he made clear that with induction “fantasy is almost given free reign” and that in the hands of the unskilled things easily degenerate into frivolity.11 Fries here was lured by the prospect of spelling out exactly how induction, when done correctly, should proceed. At the same time he revealed some degree of awareness that such a prospect was unrealizable. His efforts did, however, influence students such as Ernst Apelt (see section 17.9) who focused explicitly on induction later in the century.

8  Cf. Frederick Gregory, “Romantic Kantianism and the End of the Newtonian Dream in Chemistry,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 34 (June, 1984), pp. 108–23. 9  According to Kenneth Caneva, Fries’s conception of organism influenced some of the creators of the conservation of energy in the 1840s. Cf. K. Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 169ff. 10  Jakob Fries, Neue Kritik der Vernunft, in Gert König and Lutz Geldsetzer eds., Sämtliche Schriften (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967), IV, pp. 452–3. 11  Jakob Fries, Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, in Sämtliche Schriften, XXIV, p. 220. For a more thorough treatment of induction in Fries, see F. Gregory, “Die Kritik von J. F. Fries an Schellings Naturphilosophie,” Sudhoffs Archiv, 67, Heft 2 (1983), pp. 145–57.

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17.5  Critics of Naturphilosophie Other opponents of Naturphilosophie in the early years of the century included those who preferred to emphasize natural science as the endeavor to find out how things work rather than as a philosophical system. Natural philosopher and anatomist Carl Rudolphi (1771– 1832) complained bitterly about what he saw as Schelling’s flight into speculation, emphasizing that natural science prized careful observation above all else. While Rudolphi did not attempt to wrestle with the philosophical problems natural science raised, the same was not true of the botanist and chemist Heinrich Friedrich Link (1767–1850). Link challenged Schelling by attempting to claim Naturphilosophie for himself. From the outset of his work of 1806, Über Naturphilosophie, Link was careful to say that he was one for whom experience was the ultimate source of knowledge. But Link was no crass Baconian. He was clear about the limitations of empiricism and the necessary role of the subject in the acquisition of knowledge of the world. In particular he raised the problem of how exactly the natural philosopher unifies disparate sense observations into a unity. He was not content to solve this problem by resorting to Kant’s restrictive category of “genuine” science. But in the end, for all of his awareness of the thorny problems he had raised, the best he could do was to appeal to the “talent” of the individual to know how best to proceed, admitting in the process that natural philosophers were, as they were for Schelling, capable of exercising intellectual intuition.12

17.6  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe A critic of the Newtonian mechanical tradition was the novelist, poet, and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Like Schelling, Goethe refused to accept that the sole and primary goal of natural science was to uncover the laws governing nature’s machinery. He too insisted that limiting natural science to the analysis of causal relationships among empirical phenomena was a mistake, although Goethe was not interested in creating a philosophical system like Schelling’s Naturphilosophie to correct it. That is not to say that Goethe was uninterested in the philosophical foundations of natural science. As we shall see, Goethe was more sensitive to the complexity of the philosophical issues science raised than most of his contemporaries. Goethe’s motivation, however, stemmed more from what he saw as the misplaced confidence natural scientists exhibited concerning what they were about. Once again, the challenge lay with what natural philosophers did with empirical observations. Goethe did not object to the scientist’s practice of uniting the facts of observation into a hypothesis. The creation of theories to explain causal relationships among empirical data is a worthy enterprise, but it must also be regarded as a necessarily one-sided representation of reality. This is because hypotheses necessarily emphasize one aspect of our sensual experience of the world, which by its nature is more unified. Arthur Zajonc quotes 12 

Heinrich Friedrich Link, Über Naturphilosophie (Leipzig and Rostock: Stiller, 1806), pp. 106, 197.

342   Frederick Gregory Goethe’s Maximen und Reflexionen13 to say that even our perception of the so-called facts of nature involves theorizing. It is the intellect that separates cause from effect and substance from its attributes. Goethe’s point here was two-fold. First, any hypothetical representation of nature, although it may be supremely useful, cannot give a true and final account of nature regardless of how much consensus is reached by the community of natural philosophers. Secondly, Goethe attempted to spell out that one can aspire to and even experience nature in its wholeness before causal theories are created to make nature useful to us. As a result of the first claim Goethe, in a much discussed and later maligned work, rejected Newton’s identification of color with the quantitative measure of its refrangibility. Newton may have begun by considering his account of color as a theory, but, as Goethe is quoted by Zajonc to say in his 1793 essay, “Newton’s Hypothesis of Diverse Refrangibility”: “By and by he binds himself so in spirit to his doctrine that he gives out diverse refrangibility as an actual fact.”14 More importantly, in the process of critiquing Newton, Goethe expounded his understanding of experiment as a mediator of nature. An experiment is not done to test an hypothesis, but to interrogate nature, to enable the researcher to help the object provide its own meaning rather than to use the object to reinforce the opinion a researcher already has. Goethe summarized these ideas in the notion of a Vorstellungsart, or way of thinking. In our observations of nature we employ differing ways of thinking, as the result of which we can never be neutral observers of the nature. As he put it, with every attentive look at the world we are already theorizing. Further, as Dennis Sepper’s analysis makes clear, because the world as experienced is plural, no one way of thinking is sufficient and none, Newton’s or anyone’s, should become exclusive.15 This dimension of Goethe’s philosophy of science found more resonance in the twentieth century than it did in his own. Goethe’s second point, that one can aspire to and even experience nature in its wholeness, was related to his first. To do this one begins with ordinary observations of sense that every natural philosopher might make, including the notation of the conditions that affect its appearance. The next step, which not everyone can do, is to train the mind to seek regularities of the most general kind. To do this Goethe says in 1798 that the intellect must learn how to fix what is variable to the senses, to exclude what is accidental, to separate what is impure, to unravel what is jumbled, and even to discover what is not yet known.16 Goethe here seeks the archetypal phenomenon, nature at its purest for humans. His pursuit of this goal contributed to his discovery of the intermaxillary bone, at the time thought to be present only in mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, in humans.

13  Arthur G. Zajonc, “Fact as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Philosophy of Science,” in Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler eds., Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1987), p. 223. These maxims and reflections are not dated, but while they begin as early as the 1780s, most come from after the turn of the century. See Hans J. Schrimpf, “Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” in H. Schrimpf ed., Goethes Werke, 5th ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1963), XII, pp. 698–9. 14  Zajonc, op. cit., p. 230. 15  Dennis Sepper, Goethe contra Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 65ff, 91–9. 16  Zajonc, op. cit., p. 232.

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17.7  Philosophy of Organism and the Question of Vital Force An early devotee of the approaches of Schelling and Goethe was the physiologist Johannes Müller (1801–58), who would become famous as much for the students he taught as for the original scientific results he produced. As he studied for two years in the early 1820s under the tutelage of Carl Rudolphi in Berlin, Müller became dissatisfied with Schelling’s escape into intellectual intuition to explain the correspondence between thought and the real world. But, unlike Rudolphi, Müller did not disparage philosophy. Müller rejected what he called “rational physiology” (verständige Physiologie), by which he meant physiology as Kant would depict it. He shared with the romantics the conviction that the Kantian breech between the phenomenal and noumenal realms was unacceptable. But having discarded Schelling’s intellectual intuition, Müller faced the challenge of overcoming Kant’s restriction of reason in some other manner. Even Goethe’s artistic induction could not help since Goethe conceded the existence of an unbridgeable cleft between experience and idea. Müller became famous in the 1830s for his law of specific nerve energies, according to which the different sensations we have—seeing, hearing, and so on—are not caused by differences in the stimuli but by the different nerves that are excited. For example, regardless of how nerves of the eye are stimulated—by pressure, electricity, and so on—we experience flashes of light. This result only made Müller’s philosophical challenge more difficult since there was no longer a one-to one correspondence between a particular stimulus and the resulting sensation. How are we then to fashion a correlation between what we experience of the world and the world as it is in itself? Some took this development as support for Kant’s viewpoint. Müller conceded that the result implied that the real nature of things remains unknown to us, but insisted that there was a fixed relation between things and our ideas so that our sensations can be used as true signs of things. Ultimately we do not sense objects; rather, we sense us ourselves. In place of intellectual intuition as a way of knowing that we have uncovered the true relation between ideas and the signs of things we experience Müller appealed early on in 1824 to “an organ of a higher kind,” later, in his Handbook of Physiology, to the capacity of abstraction to make “an entity of thought out of what is common to many recurring linkages between two things [true ideas and the signs of sense experience], each of which requires the other.”17 In spite of his insistence on careful empirical work, a conviction he learned from Rudolphi, Müller’s appeal to abstraction marks him, in the end, as closer to Schelling’s intellectual intuition than Kant’s restriction of scientific explanation to the phenomenal realm. The philosophy of organism continued to occupy Germans throughout the decades around the middle of the century. Various modifications of Kant’s assertion that the original purposive organization of living things must simply be assumed as given arose over the course of the century. In the so-called teleomechanical viewpoint that made its

17  Johannes Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (Coblenz: Verlag von J. Hölscher, 1840), II, p. 519.

344   Frederick Gregory appearance in the wake of Kant, various individuals argued that Kant had erred in attributing the notion of special organic forces to regulative judgment alone. In their view such forces resulted from constitutive judgment and therefore we can know that such forces do exist. All agreed that vital forces, whatever their role, could not be explained using the laws of simple mechanism. Human reason must take the fact of purposive organization as an unexplained starting point. The question was whether or not vital forces possessed any directive agency or whether they simply indicated that there were aspects of organism that remained beyond scientific explanation. Characteristic of this German philosophy of biology, especially as manifested in embryology and developmental morphology, was the conviction that good science must not only be thoroughly empirical, it also had to be philosophically justifiable. On these issues opinions varied among some of the leading German natural philosophers of the day. Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) asserted that vital forces emerged from the arrangement of material constituents. Once present as separate forces they then exerted a directive influence to produce what we recognize as the phenomena of life. Theodor Schwann (1810–82) argued that life is the order of the parts and that it does not result from that order. There may be different forces at work in organic activity, but there are no special directive forces. Others such as the anatomist and physiologist Carl Bergmann (1814–65) and the zoologist Rudolf Leuckart (1822–98) dissented from the teleomechanical approach by arguing that the order of biological systems could be interpreted in a completely nonvitalistic fashion where there were no so-called organic forces. They agreed with the philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–81), who suggested that vital force was neither an object of experience nor a cause and therefore could neither provide an explanation of organic process nor be a directive agency of it. They did not go so far as the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), whose demonstration of the preservation of force in 1847 (later known as the conservation of energy) convinced him that it was in principle possible to show mechanically how organized matter first arose.

17.8  Hermann von Helmholtz Helmholtz studied anatomy and physiology in Berlin with Johannes Müller, completing a dissertation on the origin of nerve fibers in 1842.18 This work involved close microscopic research that much impressed Müller. It also signaled Helmholtz’s interest in the physical basis of sensation, a subject that would occupy him throughout his career. Having become convinced that physical laws explained physiological phenomena, Helmholtz took his investigations in a direction different from that of his mentor. For example, he was unimpressed by the apparent teleological function of muscles, preferring to look for the mechanism underlying their action. As a result he soon investigated the chemical reactions that

18  For a summary of Helmholtz’s work with Müller, see Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 112–18.

Philosophy of Science    345 occurred in muscles and the relationship between mechanical motion and heat. This in turn led to an inquiry about the general principles of physics that might be involved. Helmholtz’s approach took him into an area that represented the intersection between natural science and philosophy. He began by asking about the nature of force in general, concluding that there were two fundamental kinds of force in nature—motive force, or the force exerted by matter in motion, and tensive force, or the force exerted by matter under tension but not moving. In a carefully reasoned article he argued that while there were conversions between these kinds of force, their sum total always remained the same. Although Helmholtz believed that his conclusions were based directly on the experimental work he had conducted, when he submitted his work for publication in the Annalen der Physik it was rejected because it was deemed to be philosophy rather than natural science. Helmholtz was not the only one thinking about such general results. Another German, the physician Robert Mayer (1814–78), came to the conclusion prior to Helmholtz’s paper of 1847 that “force” could not be destroyed for philosophical reasons. Due to his opposition to materialism, Mayer preferred to think of force as a cause as opposed to a property of matter. As the effect of the cause appears, the cause itself disappears; hence, in the case of mechanical motion and heat, one disappears as the other appears. When he submitted his results for publication, it too was rejected as too philosophical to count as natural science. Part of the difficulty natural philosophers at the time had in appreciating the importance of these conclusions was that no clear distinction had yet been made between force and energy. As the distinction slowly became clearer, and as the categories of available and unavailable energy emerged in discussions of the role of heat in energy transformations, the formation of new laws of thermodynamics proclaimed that natural processes possessed an irreversibility that was unavoidable, even in principle. This eventually contributed to a growing awareness much later in the century that the commonly assumed simplistic mechanical depiction of nature, which was theoretically reversible, was in need of modification. It also contributed to a growing suspicion that the embrace by many of philosophical realism, seemingly supported by the amazing achievements made in natural science during the century, was premature. Because Helmholtz provided a bridge between the biological and physical sciences in Germany at mid-century, his philosophical ideas ranged widely. Although he had played a major role in introducing the new conception of energy, he himself remained firmly convinced that the role of the scientist was to discover the mechanism that was the cause of natural phenomena. To do this required that investigators have what he called in an 1862 essay an “absolute, unconditional reverence for the facts,” that in all cases they make an effort to detect relations of cause and effect.19 His heroes were Newton and Kant, the latter of whom he corrected only to the extent that he rejected an invariant relationship between the sensations we experience and the things-in-themselves. This was based on Müller’s law of specific energies, discussed in section 17.7, and was confirmed by much of Helmholtz’s own original research in the physiology of sensation.

19 

Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” in David Cahan ed., Science and Culture. Popular and Philosophical Essays: Hermann von Helmholtz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 90.

346   Frederick Gregory Helmholtz was particularly critical of the speculative school of philosophy represented by Hegel and Schelling; in fact, he drew on the misleading but stereotypical mid-century depiction of Schelling’s philosophy of identity as uninterested in empirical observation. It was, he said, based on the claim that nature and man were the result of an active thought on the part of a creative mind. As a result “it seemed competent for the human mind, even without the guidance of external experience, to think over again the thoughts of the Creator, and to rediscover them by its own inner activity.”20

17.9  Ernst Apelt and the Theory of Induction Standing directly in the tradition of Jakob Fries, Ernst Apelt (1812–59) took up Fries’s concern with the question of induction.21 Apelt’s analysis of induction and its role in natural science appeared in 1854 in a work entitled The Theory of Induction. Formal consideration of induction had originated in the seventeenth century in the work of Francis Bacon, whose “new method” celebrated the gathering of empirical data from which generalizations could be made. Bacon himself and others who considered questions of scientific method in his wake were attempting to demonstrate why the results of inductive inference, which lay at the heart of the new science, were true. In the century that followed that goal was dealt a devastating critique at the hands of David Hume, who, in conjunction with his critique of causality in general, argued that induction could never yield sure results. As a follower of Kant and Fries, Apelt could never be content with results that were dependent on experience alone which, he agreed, could never give certainty. His analysis of induction would be based on the critique of reason. He began by noting that the theory of induction was the nodal point of the relation between empiricism and metaphysics, but that, as the British historian and philosopher of induction William Whewell had declared, its logic had to this point remained nothing but a pious wish.22 In hoping that his book would contribute to the fulfillment of this wish Apelt was determined to investigate how scientific research related to the ultimate foundations of explanation itself.23 The first step toward a more satisfying understanding of philosophy of natural science was taken, according to Apelt, by Isaac Newton. In the main this was because Newton had produced a mathematical philosophy of nature and, by linking his explanations of matter and its motion to fundamental parameters of space and time, opened up the possibility of a critique of reason at the highest level. But Apelt noted that Newton himself did not remain true to

20 

Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” p. 79. Apelt first established contact with Fries as a teenager in 1829 (Frederick Gregory, “Extending Kant: The Origins and Nature of Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Philosophy of Science,” in Michael Friedmann and Alfred Nordmann eds., The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth Century Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 81–2). The encouraging response he received flowered into a career as a major contributor to the formation of a Friesian school. With the botanist Matthias Schleiden, Apelt founded the first Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule in 1847. A second series appeared in 1904 and continued to 1937. A third, under the name Ratio, began in 1957 and has continued since. 22  Ernst Apelt, Die Theorie der Induction (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1854), p. vi. 23 Apelt, Die Theorie der Induction, p. 153. 21 

Philosophy of Science    347 his own mathematical philosophy in his rules of reasoning, for (in rule 3)24 he relied solely on experience to determine the universal qualities of bodies. This reliance on experience was formally extended by John Locke and then consummated in David Hume. Apelt related how for Hume our belief in the succession of cause and effect was due merely to our habit of associating in our minds what we often see associated in experience. But we cannot infer a necessary connection between two events from the real conjunction we observe in experience. Hume did not distinguish between the subjective laws of memory, on which rests the linking of two ideas in the knowing subject, and the objective laws of knowledge, on which rests the linking of two ideas that is determined by the nature of the object.25 While Hume dispensed with all a priori knowledge, Apelt asserted “that every suitable induction in the natural sciences must be rational and that as such it is governed not by the expectation of similar cases, but by the a priori knowable laws of geometry and philosophy of nature.”26 Apelt noted that it was of course Kant who was able to move beyond Hume’s doubt by establishing the metaphysical foundations that arise from the mathematical schema of the categories as the principles of the possibility of experience.27 He agreed with Hume that our experience gives no identifying feature of cause other than that its effect consistently follows. But, he added, it is hopeless to try to convince someone that he does not have the idea of cause or to shake the belief in him of a fundamental cause of all things. This is because we cannot imagine that events could be thought without the connection of cause and effect. This connection is according to Kant’s more proper designation a condition of the possibility of experience. All natural scientists agree with the claim not only that every change of motion has a cause, but also that every change of motion must have a cause. Without this necessary basis of our knowledge of this subject there could be no natural philosophical foundations concerning the productions of motion.28

The pre-existence of causal law was very important to Apelt since he believed that when seeking a law by induction one must know in advance that there is a law and not accident. Proper induction ultimately depended on the pre-existence of law and not on previously observed uniform results. If, Apelt argued, a traveler often came upon a man with a boat to take him across a river, he could not infer that the man would always be there. If he knew, however, that the man was required to be there, then the traveler could infer it more reliably. Even then the traveler could be deceived because this “law” of regularity was of human origin. But he could not de deceived at all if a natural law were the guiding rule. “For a natural law tolerates no exceptions.”29

24 “The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which

are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.” 25 Apelt, Theorie der Induction, p. 158. 26 Apelt, Theorie der Induction, p. 159. Apelt uses here the word Naturphilosophie, by which he understood what his mentor Jakob Fries called “mathematische Naturphilosophie” as opposed to what Schelling meant by the term. 27 Apelt, Theorie der Induction, p. 163. 28 Apelt, Theorie der Induction, p. 158. 29 Apelt, Theorie der Induction, p. 146.

348   Frederick Gregory In the end Apelt held that induction, while it was not the path to necessary truths, could join necessary truths to accidental truths. Since he also believed that natural scientists could find true causes, his hopes were indicative of those at mid-century who wanted to show the conclusions of proper inductive arguments to be true. With the emergence of “philosophy of science” at the end of the century the goal for induction was to produce probability, not certainty.

17.10  Popular Philosophy of Science at Mid-Century At the time of the appearance of Apelt’s work on induction a popular scientific movement was underway that was not only critical of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, but also of philosophy itself. Enthusiasts of the position that natural science had exposed the illusory nature of all immaterial categories, replacing them with knowable material laws based on cause and effect, railed against obscurantists who refused to face the uncomfortable but undeniable reality of a cold and impersonal natural world, grinding on impervious to human needs or desires. “An empiricism of science (Wissenschaft),” wrote scientific materialist and socialist Moses Hess to an unnamed correspondent, “which is carried out fundamentally and consistently from our standpoint, makes philosophy superfluous.”30 The movement of popular science known as scientific materialism began in the late 1840s and flourished in the 1850s and after. It was particularly hard on the immaterial entities of religious belief and even on Kant’s philosophy since Kant had erected a category, the thing-in-itself, that was fundamentally unknowable. Scientific materialists resented what they regarded as a denial that the senses were the ultimate source of knowledge and that the truth of nature was not accessible.31 A related popular philosophical movement, monism, arose around the same time as scientific materialism, primarily as the result of the work of the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). While outwardly embracing the deterministic and anti-teleological view of nature of the scientific materialists, Haeckel’s hero was Goethe, whose proximity to pantheism attracted him more than did a strict materialism.32 Monism rejected the separation of reality into mind and matter; rather, monists believed that each of these categories represented properties of a more fundamental substrate. As a result monists urged a view of the natural world that embraced not only material laws, but also aesthetic and even ethical dimensions. In spite of his aggressively anti-religious 30 

Moses Hess, in E. Silberner ed., Briefwechsel, 1825–1881 (’s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1959), p. 635. The letter is marked “Hess an einen Unbekannten” and the date is given as “1873?” 31  For a treatment of the critique of philosophy by scientific materialists, see Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 145ff. 32  Indeed, Haeckel’s monism stood in the shadow of Schelling as well. Cf. Frederick Gregory, “Proto-monism in German Philosophy, Theology, and Science, 1800–1845,” in Todd Weir ed., Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), pp. 46–50.

Philosophy of Science    349 demeanor, it was the notion of a personal God that Haeckel dismissed. Haeckel’s recent biographer, Robert Richards, cites from Haeckel’s General Morphology of 1866 his belief that “God is the comprehensive causal law,” and that monism was “the purest kind of monotheism.”33

17.11  The Back to Kant Movement In response to the critique of philosophy and to what they regarded as the superficial philosophical analysis found in popular philosophical movements a number of thinkers attempted to respond by revisiting the work of Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75) wrote The History of Materialism in 1866, in which he sharpened the epistemological issues glossed over by scientific materialists like Karl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, and Jakob Moleschott. Lange’s work is sometimes said to have sparked the so-called “Back to Kant” or Neo-Kantian movement of the second half of the century. An important group of Neo-Kantian philosophers at Marburg in the 1870s emerged as leaders of the movement, dedicated according to the philosopher Alan Richardson to the establishment of epistemology as the central discipline in philosophy and “to establish a scientifically respectable philosophy in an era in which empirical science seemed to be going its own way without need for philosophical guidance.”34 Among those who called to account anyone who glorified natural science as the foundation for philosophy was the Neo-Kantian theologian Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922). As a Privatdozent at Halle, Herrmann wrote two works, the second of which landed him a position at Marburg in 1879. It was this second work, Religion in Relation to Knowledge of the World, that most directly challenged those who were basing grandiose philosophical claims on the results of empirical science. In both books Herrmann, in good Neo-Kantian fashion, attacked the presumption of his age that it was nearing the truth of nature. The enemy, as he saw it, was metaphysics. In the first work, Metaphysics in Theology, he warned theologians not to make their work dependent on the old Platonistic goal of acquiring a unified view of the world since, as Kant had shown, that goal was unattainable. Having banished metaphysics from theology, he next set out to banish it from natural science. In the second book Herrmann equated natural science with Naturbeherrschung, mastering the world. Any attempt to use knowledge gained in natural science to erect a comprehensive system, to “complete” phenomenal objects, was metaphysics and, in spite of what some scientists might believe, could not be seen as a real completion of scientific

33  Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggles over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 128. 34  Alan Richardson, “ ‘The Fact of Science’ and Critique of Knowledge: Exact Science as Problem and Resource in Marburg Neo-Kantianism,” in Friedmann and Nordmann, op. cit., p. 211. Richardson deals in the main with the work of the Marburg Neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. Another Neo-Kantian thinker, Hans Vaihinger, who examined the nature of scientific hypotheses, is not considered here because his major work, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, although completed in 1877, was not published until 1911.

350   Frederick Gregory knowledge of the world. All such attempts imparted a “characteristic coloring” to the conceptual apparatus of natural science— there was no objective comprehensive view of reality.35 Herrmann’s reference to the fundamental hypothesis of the scientific explanation of nature as “the hypothesis of the comprehensibility of the world”36 was regarded as too radical by even some Neo-Kantians. Paul Natorp (1854–1924), soon-to-be-colleague in philosophy at Marburg, complained that the idea of natural law did not arise from experience and yet was essential to the natural scientist. For Natorp, eternal natural law marked the goal “to which our knowledge approaches as it were asymptotically”37 while for Herrmann success in science must in the end, as it is for any anti-realist, simply be a miracle.38

17.12  Critiques of Classical Physics and Scientific Realism Later in the century, as monism became more popular, others joined its cause. The physical chemist and eventual Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932) became convinced that the fundamental substrate of monism could be identified with energy and that the first law of thermodynamics, according to which forms of energy can be transformed into each other but the total amount of energy remains constant, ensured the quantitative equality between cause and effect. As the century came to an end he began to take up the monist cause under the guise of “energeticism” and founded the Monist League in 1906 to bring together those sympathetic to the monist cause. Like Ostwald the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), a frequent contributor to a new journal called The Monist,39 felt that physics could not rely on the classical foundation of mechanics. In his youth Mach had had an epiphany while reading Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself, an eminently metaphysical category, suddenly appeared to Mach as superfluous. The reality that did impress Mach was the coherent mass of sensations. As he worked out what he saw as the implications of this insight, Mach rejected scientific realism and concluded that the task of the scientist in creating physical theories was simply to give an account of sensations in an economical manner, without suggesting that the result pretended to represent nature as it

35  Wilhelm Herrmann, Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1879), p. 71. A general treatment of Herrmann may be found in Frederick Gregory, Nature lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), chs. 6 and 7. 36  Herrmann, op. cit., p. 35. 37  Paul Natorp, “Über das Verhältnis des theoretischen und praktischen Erkennens zur Begründung einer nicht empirischen Realität,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 79 (1881), p. 252. 38  Hilary Putnam, “What is Realism?” in Jarett Leplin ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 41. 39  In the United States the founder of the Open Court Publishing Company formed The Monist in 1888, a journal that today regards itself as one of the oldest and most important journals of philosophy.

Philosophy of Science    351 really was. “With the valuable parts of physical theories,” he wrote later in his 1886 Analysis of Sensations, “we necessarily absorb a good dose of false metaphysics, which it is very difficult to sift out from what deserves to be preserved, especially when those theories have become very familiar to us.”40 As the second half of the century had worn on, the mechanical models physicists had come to rely on were beginning to produce enigmatic results. Mach was among those who felt that reliance on atoms, for example, was a mistake. His debate with the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) on the status of atoms in physics sharpened the issue of the status of models in science, especially after the turn of the century when atoms continued to prove extremely useful. Boltzmann’s defense of atoms has made him appear to be a defender of scientific realism to many. As a founder of statistical mechanics, by which he provided a theoretical description of the behavior of the molecules of a gas, Boltzmann refused to acknowledge that molecules did not exist, that they merely provided an economical means of accounting for empirical data. Boltzmann was, as a biographer has put it, “a realist, but not a naïve one.”41 He believed that something unobservable existed, but he acknowledged that the best we can do is to use hypothetical entities like atoms to deal with them. Such entities produce no certainty and may be replaced in the future by others, but they represent attempts to explain phenomena whose source lies in nature, not in ourselves. As the century came to an end the world of natural science was pregnant with issues that would only come to term after 1900. Most scientists assumed that they were engaged in the pursuit of nature’s truth; in fact, to many it appeared that such a goal was close to being realized. As we have seen, a few philosophers did raise questions about the capacity of science to deliver on such a lofty goal, but the fundamental reorientation of the philosophical options would only emerge into greater clarity after the turn of the new century with the advent of quantum theory, relativity, and new approaches to heredity and evolution.

Bibliography Amrine, F., F. Zucker, and H. Wheeler, eds., 1987. Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Apelt, E. F., 1854. Die Theorie der Induction. Leipzig: Engelmann. Cahan, D., ed., 1995. Science and Culture. Popular and Philosophical Essays: Hermann von Helmholtz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Caneva, K., 1993. Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy. Princeton:  Princeton University Press. Cercignani, C., 1998. Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man who Trusted Atoms. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedmann, M. and A. Nordmann, eds., 2006. The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: MIT Press.

40 

Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, 5th ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), p. 30, n. 1. Carlo Cercignani, Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man who Trusted Atoms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 170. 41 

352   Frederick Gregory Fries, J., 1803. Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling, in Gert König and Lutz Geldsetzer eds., 1981. Sämtliche Schriften, Vol XXIV. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. Fries, J., 1808. Neue Kritik der Vernunft, in Gert König and Lutz Geldsetzer eds., 1967. Sämtliche Schriften, Vol IV. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. Gregory, F., 1977. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Gregory, F., 1983. “Die Kritik von J. F. Fries an Schellings Naturphilosophie,” Sudhoffs Archiv, 67, Heft 2, pp. 145–57. Gregory, F., 1984. “Romantic Kantianism and the End of the Newtonian Dream in Chemistry,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 34, pp. 108–23. Gregory, F., 1992. Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gregory, F., 2006. “Extending Kant: The Origins and Nature of Jakob Friedrich Fries’s Philosophy of Sscience,” in M. Friedmann and A. Nordmann eds., 2006, pp. 81–100. Gregory, F., 2012. “Proto-monism in German Philosophy, Theology, and Science, 1800–1845,” in T. Weir ed., 2012, pp. 45–69. Helmholtz, H., 1862. “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” in D. Cahan ed., 1995, pp. 76–95. Herrmann, W., 1879. Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit. Halle: Niemeyer. Hess, M., 1873. In E. Silberner ed., 1959. Briefwechsel, 1825-1881. s-Gravenhage: Mouton. Kant, I., 1781. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissen­ schaften ed., 1903. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 4. Berlin: Georg Reimer. Kant, I., 1786. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, in E. Cassirer ed., 1922. Immanuel Kant’s Werke. Vol. 4. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Kant, I., 1790. Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften ed., 1908. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Berlin: Georg Reimer. Leplin, J., ed., 1984. Scientific Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Link, H. F., 1806. Über Naturphilosophie. Leipzig and Rostock: Stiller. Löw, R., 1980. Philosophie des Lebendigen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Mach, E., 1886. The Analysis of Sensations, 5th ed. 1959. New York: Dover Publications. Müller, J., 1840. Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, Vol. II. Coblenz:  Verlag von J. Hölscher. Natorp, P., 1881. “Über das Verhältnis des theoretischen und praktischen Erkennens zur Begründung einer nichtempirischen Realität,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 79, pp. 242–59. Otis, L., 2007. Müller’s Lab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, H., 1984. “What is Realism?” in Scientific Realism, J. Leplin ed., 1984, pp. 140–53. Richards, R., 2008. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggles Over Evolutionary Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richardson, A., 2006. “‘The Fact of Science’ and Critique of Knowledge: Exact Science as Problem and Resource in Marburg Neo-Kantianism,” in M. Friedmann and A. Nordmann eds., 2006, pp. 211–26. Schelling, F., 1799. Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. In: 1858. Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II. Stuttgart: Cotta’scher Verlag. Schrimpf, H., 1963. “Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” in Schrimpf ed., 1963. Goethes Werke, 5th ed. Vol. 12. Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag.

Philosophy of Science    353 Sepper, D., 1988. Goethe contra Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szaz, T., 1959. “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in E. Mach. 1886, pp. v–xxxi. Weir, T., ed., 2012. Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zajonc, A., 1987. “Fact as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Philosophy of Science,” in F. Amrine, F. Zucker, and H. Wheeler eds., 1987, pp. 219–45. Ziche, P., 2012. “Monist Philosophy of Science: Between Worldview and Scientific Metareflection,” in T. Weir ed., 2012, pp. 159–77.

Chapter 18

Philosoph y of Mi n d Barbara Gail Montero 18.1 Introduction In Germany during the nineteenth century there was, as there is today, enormous interest in understanding the mind, its structure, its place in the world, and the possibility of a complete scientific account of human nature. Nineteenth-century Germany also witnessed a flowering of thought about the machinations of unconscious mental processes, thought which would go on to influence Sigmund Freud’s work at the turn of the twentieth century. And, as today, these ideas were discussed and debated among philosophers as well as natural scientists and educated members of the general public. In this chapter, I focus on a small sampling of issues from nineteenth-century German philosophy and point out ways in which they resonate with various topics in contemporary philosophy of mind. For some this approach may prove to be a puzzle inside of a conundrum, however, I hope that for others it will bring out some interesting connections between then and now.

18.2  The Reinhold-Fichte-Hegel Model of Consciousness Although there were deep and virulent disagreements among the philosophers Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte about how to understand consciousness— Fichte (1745/1930),1 for example, writing to Reinhold in 1795, “I am a declared opponent of your system”—these and other philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century held a similar view about the basic structure of consciousness, a view about what all forms of consciousness share. This is the idea, roughly, that consciousness involves awareness of an object, of the self, and of the self’s representation of the object. Reinhold (1789, p. 167) referred to this as the “principle of consciousness,” which he stated as follows: “in consciousness 1  Quoted in Breazeale (1981). See also Breazeale (1982). Reinhold’s goal was to systemize Kant and antecedents to his view about consciousness are found in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Philosophy of Mind    355 representation is distinguished through the subject from the subject and object and related to both.” Much of the interest in this principle at the time had to do with what Reinhold saw as its primary value:  that it would give philosophy its much-needed indubitable grounds, thus enabling it to become a science—not an empirical science, but, even better, a science about which no doubt remains. For the principle of consciousness, according to Reinhold, was a self-evident principle from which all further philosophical claims could be derived. “Consciousness forces everyone to agree,” Reinhold (1789, p. 200) claimed, “that to every representation there pertains a representing subject and a represented object, both of which must be distinguished from the representation to which they pertain.” Furthermore, such a self-evident, universally valid proposition was needed, he argued, “or else philosophy as a science is impossible, and in that case the bases for our ethical duties and rights—as well as these duties and rights themselves—must remain forever undecided.”2 Whether the principle of consciousness did this work, however, was questioned by, among others, the philosopher Gottlob Ernst Schulze. Schulze held that the principle, rather than being self-evident, had the status of an empirical generalization, indeed, an empirical generalization that was neither universally valid nor capable of grounding the rest of Reinhold’s philosophy.3 But let me put aside the larger question of whether such a principle can serve as a grounds for philosophy and focus on the truth of the principle, on the question of whether consciousness contains these elements, an idea that has striking similarities to the views of certain contemporary theorists, such as Uriah Kriegel (2003, p. 104), who claims that “in your auditory experience of [a]‌bagpipe you are aware primarily, or explicitly, of the bagpipe sound [the object]; but you are also implicitly aware that this auditory experience of the bagpipe [your representation of the bagpipe] is your experience [the self].” Despite Schulze’s criticism, this model of consciousness maintained its hold in the philosophical community in Germany into the nineteenth century and, as Michael Forster (1998, p. 117) points out, Hegel typically proceeds on the assumption that consciousness does have this threefold structure, with Hegel even at one point echoing Reinhold’s wording of his principle: “[c]‌onsciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it.” In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, however, Hegel does submit the view to some scrutiny. “Consciousness,” Hegel (1807/1977, §85) states, “is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth,” which seems to capture at least the idea that in being conscious of an object (what for it is the True) we are also aware of representing—not just representing but aware of representing—the object (that is, we are conscious of our knowledge of the truth). Yet how does consciousness get to the object? Why does it not just stop at the representation? Hegel anticipates these questions, telling us that although it might seem “that consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine 2 

Quoted in Breazeale (1982). Breazeale (1982) explains that Fichte, persuaded by Schulze’s criticism, aimed to arrive at an even more basic principle from which the principle of consciousness follows, and what he proceeds to show in his Science of Knowledge is how the representational element of consciousness can be derived from the act of positing a subject and an object. 3 

356   Barbara Gail Montero what the object is in itself,” nonetheless “the distinction between the in-it-self and knowledge [representation] is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all”; that is, the very fact that we are representing an object, Hegel seems to think, implies that there is an object—“something quite separate from us,” as he puts it in Faith and Being (1802/1907, p. 383)4—that we are representing. What are we to say of the Reinhold-Fichte-Hegel (RFH) model of consciousness? Is consciousness representational? And if it is, are we aware of it as such? Does consciousness contain awareness of the self? Does it contain awareness of objects? These are, of course, difficult and much debated questions, but let me touch on a few considerations. Of the three elements, the idea that consciousness is representational in some sense or other was generally taken as the linchpin of the view, with Fichte (1794/1988, p. 71), for example, arguing that the representational element of consciousness is derived from the act of positing a subject and an object and at one point remarking that the idea that we could understand consciousness without representation was “a piece of whimsy, a pipe dream, a nonthought.” Some contemporary philosophers, however, such as John Searle (1983) and Amy Kind (2013), suggest that moods like free-floating anxiety or general depression may be conscious, yet they do not represent anything.5 Of course, as those who hold representational accounts of consciousness do today, someone who upholds the RFH model of consciousness might find representations lurking in these darker moments—general depression is depression about everything, they might say. Still, even if consciousness is representational, it is a further question whether we are conscious that we are representing objects. Another contemporary philosopher, Joseph Levine (2006, p. 179), seems to think we are not: “I am not in any way aware of any cognitive distance between me and the scene in front of me; the fact that what I’m doing is representing the world is clearly not itself part of the experience.” Hegel (1807/1977, §85), however, seems to think this distance is part of consciousness: “something is for it the in-itself [the scene]; and cognition, or the being of the object for consciousness [my representing the scene], is, for it, another moment.” One objection to the idea that consciousness contains an awareness of the self, an objection that was voiced at the time and is heard today in connection with the concept of “flow,” is based on the idea that sometimes we get “lost,” in thought, in sensation, or in action.6 When we are engrossed in a philosophical problem and making progress (which may happen occasionally), are we not lost in thought? When we experience overwhelming pain, is it not true that the only thing present to our minds is the pain? And, when all is going well, might not the self disappear in running a marathon or dancing Swan Lake? Kriegel deals 4  Quoted in Forster (1998). Even assuming that a distinction between representation and object exists in the concept of object, whether all consciousness involves a distinction between representation and object still depends on whether all consciousness is consciousness of objects (for discussion, see Forster, 1998). 5  And some see consciousness as not representational at all. Such philosophers instead see consciousness as a relation between the self and objects that does not involve representations, in part, because they think it does not make sense to talk of perception as being either true or false. See Susanna Schellenberg’s (2010) discussion of the view she calls “austere relationalism.” 6  James Messina (2011) points out that this objection was made by Johann Schwab, who, commenting on Reinhold’s principle of consciousness, asks, “Is there not a consciousness where we do not distinguish ourselves from the object; and is this not the case when we lose ourselves, as one says, in a sensation?”

Philosophy of Mind    357 with such objections by making the awareness of the self in conscious experience implicit rather than explicit. But I wonder if one need even concede as much, for just what is it to get lost in movement? I believe that a more accurate description of such situations is not that one gets lost, but rather that all those uninvited worries about death, taxes, and the like that have been crowding your mind vanish. The self is there when movement flows and you feel lost; but it is just your better self.7 The idea that the self gets lost when thought flows may also be questioned. Does one really lose the self, or do you experience yourself as focused on a particularly engaging topic? Moreover, in as much as one does get “lost” either in thought or in skill, it seems that, again, one might argue (contra the idea of phenomenal consciousness) that consciousness does as well, for if there are times when you get lost, perhaps because you are working on automatic pilot, there is no conscious at all.8 And although the case of the self getting lost in pain is a difficult one, it might be said that at least when pain is not overwhelming, one has a sense of an object (the painful sensation in, say, your foot) and of one’s awareness of such an object (if only, you might think, I could turn my awareness away from it).9 As for overwhelming pain, a defender of the RHF model of consciousness might resort to making the awareness of the self implicit. However, there is another line of defense: since, arguably, one can’t actually remember what goes on in extreme pain, one might argue that one cannot know whether the self is present. Perhaps, a defender of the RHF model of consciousness might say, in pain, one has the experience, I am in pain; yet one forgets.10 A further consideration that is sometimes bandied about today in discussions of whether consciousness is representational involves the neurological disorder “pain asymbolia,” whereby one experiences pain but feels disconnected from it; individuals who have this condition may say that they don’t mind the pain and even that it feels as if it is someone else’s pain. If we take these statements at face value, what should they lead us to believe? Some think that pain asymbolia illustrates that the experience of p need not involve an experience to the effect that I am experiencing p. Yet one might say that pain asymbolia illustrates the relative forcefulness of the “I” in ordinary pain experiences.11 Furthermore, one might find the self in the experience of feeling as if someone else is in pain: it is I who is aware of someone else’s pain. As for the idea that in consciousness we are always aware of objects, this is refuted, according to Schulze, by examples of deep reflection, wherein, Schulze maintains, it is only our ruminations that are present. But now we are entering the rocky terrain involving what is to count as an object. Forster (1998, p. 188) suggests, in his defense of Hegel’s idea that all consciousness involves thinking of something as objective, that “even if one is conscious only of one’s own mental states, still one must think of them as objectively or really 7  Or rather, I would argue that when experts perform at their best, in general the self is not lost. See Montero (forthcoming), for discussion of this issue. 8  For a neuroscientific approach to the question of whether a certain type of self-consciousness is necessarily part of consciousness experience, see Goldberg, Harel, and Malach (2006). 9  This might not always be a helpful thought since it might be that in some situations, focusing on pain, rather than distracting oneself from it, reduces it. See Johnston, Atlas, and Wager (2012). 10  Another line of defense might even be that as there is no memory, there was no conscious experience. 11  Of course, if we take what these individuals say at face value, this would still seem to counter the idea that it is analytic or necessary that conscious experience involves awareness of a subject.

358   Barbara Gail Montero mental states.” In short, the question of the validity of the RFH model of consciousness is very much an open one.

18.3  Hegel’s Dissolution of the Mind–Body Problem Hegel, in overcoming mind–body dualism, had an explicit practical motivation:  he felt that his culture’s acceptance of dualism led to unhappiness; persuade people to think of mind and body differently, and such unhappiness is eliminated.12 And the way he aims to persuade individuals to see the union in the disunion of mind and body is by helping them to understand Geist, or what is often translated as “spirit.” How successful are Hegel’s arguments against dualism? And does the elimination of dualism help to alleviate unhappiness? In the Encyclopaedia, Hegel (1830/1971, §389) tells us that “the soul is no separate immaterial entity,” not because the soul or mind is material in the sense of solid, weighty matter, but rather because matter is far less material than is often presumed. Once we realize this, Hegel tells us, the question of mind–body dualism dissolves: “the question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is resolved as something true, and mind conceived as a thing, on the other.” To accept this type of disunity, he argues, is a mistake, for “in modern times, even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands,” and “they have come upon imponderable matters, like heat, light.” For Hegel, as matter thins, so does the problem of the relation between mind and matter, for if matter is, as Hegel sees it, just as mysterious as mind, there is no question of either materialism or immaterialism. This is Hegel’s dissolution of the mind–body problem. In contrast, the Cartesian conception of matter, or body, which holds that body is extension—extension in length, breadth, and depth—grounds the mind–body problem: if mind is unextended and body is extended the distinction is plain, since something unextended cannot be identical to something extended. Moreover, if causal interaction requires contact, causal interaction between mind and body on the Cartesian picture is at best difficult to fathom. In Hegel’s words, “the usual answer [as to how to understand the interdependence between mind and body], perhaps, was to call it an incomprehensible mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not.” But physics as Hegel saw it, and even more so today, fails to suggest a conception of matter, wherein matter is diametrically opposed to mind.

12  I say “explicit” here because although philosophers’ views on the mind-body problem today are often explicitly expressed as being motivated by purely theoretical concerns, grounded in logical argumentation, I think it is a reasonable guess that implicit motivations are at least sometimes at work as well.

Philosophy of Mind    359 For Hegel, the inaccuracy of the Cartesian conception of matter was apparent in such physical phenomena as light and heat, which, in accord with the physics of his day, have, he says, “lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance.” And the more we learn about matter, the more “imponderable” it becomes. Noam Chomsky (1993, p. 41) puts it well: it is difficult to arrive at a “delimitation of ‘the physical,’ that excludes Fregean ‘thoughts’ in principle, but includes mathematical objects that ‘push each other about,’ massless particles, curved space-time, infinite onedimensional strings in 10-dimensional space, and whatever will be contrived tomorrow.” Or as Bertrand Russell said in 1927 (p. 104), “matter has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist’s séance.” Like Russell and Chomsky, the thinning of matter allows Hegel to see mind, or “vital spirit,” as sitting comfortably in the physicist’s world. Yet the distinction between mind and matter, for Hegel, does not entirely disappear:  these “imponderables,” he tells us, “which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the ‘vital’ matter, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material.” Nonetheless, “vital matter,” on Hegel’s view, still is matter.13 And today, with the matter of physicists being described in terms of equations and functions and, as such, no longer even having a sensible existence and an “outness” of part to part, the mind–body problem dissipates almost entirely. It should be clear that I am rather sympathetic to Hegel’s dissolution to the mind–body problem. But let me look at a very different approach he takes to arguing against dualism: what some commentators have seen as his argument for behaviorism. Hegel tells us in Phenomenology of Sprit (1807/1977, §322) that “the true being of a person is that person’s deed” and that “when a person’s performance and inner possibility, capacity or intention are contrasted, it is the former alone which is to be regarded as their true actuality, even if he deceives himself on the point, and, turning away from his action into himself fancies that in this inner self he is something else than what he is in the deed.” The deed, he tells us, “is not merely a sign, but the fact itself . . . and the individual human being is what the deed is.” And in the Encyclopaedia (1830/1975, §140), referring favorably to the Gospels, in which it is written, “by their fruits ye shall know them,” Hegel tells us, “a man is what he does.” Is Hegel, then, a behaviorist, holding the view that mind isn’t distinct from body since it is no more than the movements of the body? I am not convinced that Hegel is presenting an argument for a metaphysical position, which tells us what the mind is, rather than a normative one, which tells us how we ought to judge others. Or at least, if Hegel is arguing for metaphysical behaviorism, he arrives at it by means of normative considerations, considerations that have an echo in a strand of present-day feminism. Hegel is bothered, and rightly so in my opinion, by people who brag about how great they are or about how they could have done great things, when, in fact, their actions do not reveal this. Similarly, Hegel is infuriated when others judge someone not by what the individual has done, but by how the individual supposedly is inwardly,

13  See Montero (1999, 2001, and 2005) for further discussion of how to understand the concept of matter in discussions of the mind–body problem.

360   Barbara Gail Montero criticizing those who might discredit someone’s apparently praiseworthy actions because they think that the inner motivation for such actions was merely vanity or some other contemptible passion. He seems to think that, at least for adults, what matters is what they do. And if so, though he does not speak of such cases explicitly, Hegel would seem to think it similarly wrong to praise an adult for all his inner genius, if such “genius” has not produced any worthwhile actions, for, as researchers point out today, such praise may very well be influenced by implicit biases, or stereotyping.14 Hegel, I think, is right: in such situations, we should praise people according to what they do, rather than how they supposedly are inside. In fact, I think that Hegel might not go far enough in his advice, for he (1830/1975, §140) seems to accept that “a sharp-eyed teacher may, from perceiving in a boy marked talents, express the opinion that there is a Raphael or Mozart in him,” even if it is “the outcome [that] will then teach to what extent such an opinion was grounded.” If our perceptions of others come with implicit biases, as tests such as the implicit bias test seem to indicate, then even such an attitude needs to be adopted with caution for it is most likely that certain groups of individuals will be seen has having inner potential, and that perception, rather than having its accuracy tested by the pupil’s future actions, can in part determine them (those with Mozart inside of them will of course be trained more rigorously than those without such perceived talent), which is great for those who are seen as having potential, yet detrimental for those who are seen as lacking it.15 So it seems, then, that there is at least a normative component to Hegel’s view. But why is it not also a metaphysical behaviorist view? Perhaps the above claim provides a clue, for Hegel seems to think that there is something that the sharp-eyed teacher notices, that there is some inner potential or talent. The ultimate judge of whether such talent exists, or how great it is, he holds, is going to be seen, at least in the long-run, in behavior. Yet apart from the fact that he says that the deed is not merely the sign of the mind, but the mind itself, he seems to accept that we do have intentions, for if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be the case that, as he (1830/1975, §140) says, “[occasionally] in individual cases . . . well-meant intentions are brought to nothing by unfavorable outward circumstances.” And indeed, in such cases— for example, when a person sets out to help a sick child, yet is struck with an illness himself and can no longer follow through—we want to look to a person’s intentions rather than actions and praise those intentions rather than seeing such a person as worthless because of his or her inaction. Of course, Hegel would say, and probably rightly so, that we determine whether such intentions exist in the first place by the actions they produce. But this does not mean that the inner intention does not exist and, when illness strikes, it would not seem right to say that that person’s worth is the totality of their deeds. Similar claims could be made for inner intelligence. Although in favorable circumstances we ought to judge people’s smarts by what they do, in unfavorable circumstances, such as extreme poverty, the wisest council would seem to be: make no judgment at all, or, perhaps even better, assume Mozarts, Raphaels, and Galileos exist in all. So although I think that Hegel’s dissolution of the mind–body problem based on the thinning of matter is persuasive, I am not 14 

See Saul (2013) for discussion of implicit bias and women in philosophy. One might also wonder about the extent to which Mozart himself had “Mozart inside of him,” for it is well known that his father played a large role in guiding his musical development. See Rushton (2006). 15 

Philosophy of Mind    361 convinced that his behaviorist leanings should be understood as an argument for metaphysical behaviorism. This bring us to the question of whether overcoming mind–body dualism does the practical work he thinks it does; that is, whether it promotes happiness. Whatever one may think of the truth of Hegel’s metaphysical picture, his motivation is noble; who can cavil with wanting to promote happiness? But does separating the mind from body lead to unhappiness? Perhaps it does if dualism leads us to value individuals not for their bodily actions but for what goes on in their minds; for such a picture, as Hegel (1807/1977, §322) suggests, may lead to thinking of one’s actions as meaningless: “[w]‌ork and enjoyment . . . lose all universal content and significance.” Hegel, however, also thought that dualism was at the root, or at least a key component, of the Christian disparagement of the body. Dualism, he thought (§225), leads to embarrassment about our natural bodily functions and to the view that “it is in them that the enemy reveals himself in his characteristic shape.” I am not so sure. Specifically, I’m not sure if any thoroughgoing materialist would or should feel any less shame than a dualist would at what we now take to be shame worthy bodily functions. For example, materialist or dualist, one should be ashamed of, say, pedophilic actions. If anything, it would seem that thinking of the body as the not-self would make one less ashamed of its movements. It was, after all, a bodily urge, one might say in explanation of a purported shameful act, and thus not representative of who I really am. Of course, if one accepts a religious doctrine that disparages the body, then that doctrine might lead you to be at war with certain aspects of your bodily self. However, this would seem to result entirely from the doctrine’s demotion of the body rather than its promotion of dualism. Indeed, it might even be that, rather than mind–body dualism leading to desecrating the body, it is the desecration of the body that makes one distance oneself from one’s body and thus leads to mind–body dualism.

18.4 The Materialismusstreit In September of 1854, 23  years after Hegel died, the prominent Göttingen physiologist Rudolph Wagner presented a general lecture before the Association of German Scientists and Physicians. In this lecture, he condemned the zoologist Carl Vogt’s materialistic stance on the soul and the origin of human beings. The ensuing intellectual melee over the relative roles of religion and science in our understanding of the world, what came to be known as the Materialismusstreit, or the controversy over materialism, touched virtually all aspects of German society, affecting science, politics, religion, morality, education, even the food people chose to eat, and in many ways prefigured the schism we find today at the root of some of our thorniest political battles: abortion, gay marriage, cloning, and contraception.16 Materialism had been gaining popularity among German academics through the views of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who had studied with Hegel and, with the aim of, as

16  Regarding the issue of diet, it was during the Materialismusstreit that, for example, the well-known pun, “Der Mensch ist, was er isst,” originated.

362   Barbara Gail Montero he put it, “plunging into the direct opposite,” also went on to study anatomy.17 However, the central players in the Materialismusstreit, which took place in the public eye, were scientists, such as Vogt, who, among other things, had a flair for rhetoric. In his Physiologische Briefe (Letters on Physiology), Vogt claimed that all mental processes “are but functions of the brain substance or, to express myself a bit crudely here, that thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as gall does to the liver or urine to the kidneys.” Though today many materialists hold precisely Vogt’s view that mental processes are functions of the brain (though they would likely quibble with his analogy, seeing it as having too much in common with dualism, as it makes mental processes out as something secreted by and thus separate from the functioning of the brain), at the time it was considered scandalous and was the subject of much ridicule. Vogt, however, remained undaunted, seeing his materialistic understanding of the mind as following directly from his scientific investigations of the brain and his experiments on animals; “to assume a soul that makes use of the brain as an instrument with which it can work as it pleases,” Vogt said, “is pure nonsense.” Wagner, on the other hand, was inclined to think that Vogt’s materialism was actually worse than pure nonsense, for as he saw it, it was dangerous nonsense.18 Though Wagner was also a scientist, he held that there were certain limits to what science can and should investigate.19 Not only was materialism not grounded in empirical evidence, according to Wagner, but it also presented a serious threat to the moral and political order. There is no reason, Wagner argued, why a religious conception of the origin of human life on earth and the immortality of the soul cannot be upheld consistently with a scientific picture of the world. On Wagner’s (1854) view, the realms of science and spirituality have nothing to say to one another: “reason and belief are just as different from one another, . . . as the senses, as vision and hearing”(pp. 18, 14f.). To accept the picture Vogt paints of the natural world, Wagner said, “would completely destroy the moral foundations of social order” and thus it is our “duty to the nation” to reject it.20 The debate brought others into the fray and over the next two decades, the schism grew ever more virulent and vitriolic. For example, the physiologist and physician Ludwig Büchner, in his popular and provocative Force and Matter, argued that “atheism, or philosophical Monism, alone leads to freedom, to intelligence, to progress, to due recognition of a man—in a word, to Humanism.”21 And Andreas Wagner (no relation to Rudolph Wagner) defended the other side, calling Vogt a conniving deceiver and arguing that the history of science provides no reason to think that the posits of science and religion cannot be consistently upheld. Materialism, rather than following from science, according to Andreas Wagner, “belongs to the diseased phenomena of our time which have resulted from the

17  It is unlikely that Vogt had read Feuerbach’s works, for he had a strong aversion to philosophy, yet he was likely exposed to some of Feuerbach’s ideas second hand. See Gregory (1977). 18  Many of the materialists also saw their opponents’ views as dangerous since they saw them as devaluing existence here on earth. 19  His scientific approach to materialism is illustrated by the fact that he tried to discredit Vogt’s thesis, unsuccessfully according to Vogt, by weighing brains, claiming that if the mind is purely material, more intelligent people should be endowed with heavier brains. See Vogt (1864). 20  Wagner, R. (1854), op. cit. 21  Büchner, L. (1855), Kraft und Stoff. Empirisch-naturphilosophische Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger).

Philosophy of Mind    363 displacement of the Christian standpoint and have gripped all classes of civil society like an influenza.”22 Part of the interest in this debate, and no doubt part of the reason why it captivated the public at large, has to do with the personalities involved. None of the central players were overflowing with that virtue we call “modesty,” and all had consummate command of invectives. However, there is quite a bit of philosophical interest as well; for debates arose about the existence of God, the nature of consciousness, the limits of scientific knowledge, the respective roles and importance of sense experience and rational thought in our understanding of the world, the reduction of chemistry, biology, and physiology to physics, the origin of morality, the existence of free will, and the epistemic status of faith. The sine qua non of the materialist position, however, during this time was atheism; there is nothing beyond this world, was the cry, and what science cannot capture, must be relegated to a figment of the imagination. “The world is not the realization of a unitary creative mind, but rather a complex of things and fact,” Büchner said, and “we must recognize it as it is, not as we would like to imagine it.”23 The loser on this picture, as we will see, was free will, yet consciousness, if not the entire triad of mind, meaning, and morality, was seen as amenable to a complete scientific explanation, and thus preserved, as materialists saw it. Vogt, no doubt, thought that he was salvaging the mind, and in particular, consciousness, by identifying mental processes with functions of the brain. Pointing to what we today call the “explanatory gap” between mind and brain, his opponents ridiculed his approach. Their criticism is brought out perhaps most acutely by the philosopher Hermann Lotze. Lotze wanted to know how, on a materialistic picture of the universe according to which all of nature is ultimately mechanical movements of extended substance, could consciousness exist? If the workings of the brain are no different in essence from the workings of a spinning-jenny, he asked, are we to then say that a spinning-jenny is conscious? The physician Heinrich Czolbe, a lesser known, though in Lotze’s eyes more consistent materialist, took Lotze’s comments to heart, leading him to diverge from the other materialists. Czolbe admitted that Lotze had rightly identified an unbridgeable gap between a mechanical description of consciousness and one’s own experience of consciousness and responded by reducing human consciousness to fundamental consciousness in nature, propounding what might be seen as panpsychism.24 To the question of whether a spinning-jenny is conscious, Czolbe now had an answer: Yes, it is, but just a little. However, remaining committed to atheism, he denied that consciousness implied or was in any way connected to a realm of reality beyond the scope of science and empirical inquiry. Moreover, by similarly pushing morality and something he called “purpose” down to the level of fundamental physics, he sought to retain morality and purpose in a world without God. Though the materialists saw themselves as preserving consciousness, free will did not fare as well. Büchner trumpeted the view that “not only what we are, but also what we do, want, sense, and think . . . depends on the same natural necessity as the entire construction of the world.”25 And Vogt argued that physiological investigation shows us that “man, as 22 

23  Büchner, op. cit. p. iv. Quoted in Gregory (1977, p. 38). This is similar to how various non-religious philosophers who accept the idea of an ineliminable explanatory gap between mind and brain, such as Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and Galen Strawson, respond to such a lacuna today. 25  Büchner, op. cit. p. 236. 24 

364   Barbara Gail Montero well as animal, is just a machine” and, with characteristic boldness, explained that because tampering with the brain leads to changes in the mind, the proposition that we have free will is refuted.26 Perhaps the move here from premise to conclusion is rather quick, nonetheless, materialism and freedom of the will do make unhappy bedfellows. Regardless of anything else one might say of the ontological status of the mind, inasmuch as it interacts with matter in a deterministic way (for example, insofar as brain damage deterministically leads to damaged mental processes) or inasmuch as mental processes cause actions that occur on a deterministic plane (such as the movements of our bodies), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the mind is determined.27 Yet, it is also difficult for materialists to maintain a coherent position on free will. Karl Fischer (1853), a professor of philosophy at Erlangen, brought this out in his criticism of Vogt and other materialists: how is it possible, he asked, to accept both, as the materialists seem to do, that the mind is entirely material and that human beings are masters over their voluntary actions? How is it possible to accept that humans are responsible yet lack freedom? Some of this inconsistency can be straightened out. Vogt was a staunch supporter of freedom in the political realm, especially regarding the separation of church and state, indeed, arguing that the very existence of a religious institution is necessarily an impediment to freedom. Such a call for political freedom can be seen as consistent with deterministic views about the mind and indeed is analogous to the type of freedom present day “compatibilists” argue for in defining freedom as, for example, freedom from external constraints. However, on Fischer’s side, it also seems that some of the motivation for Vogt’s atheism evaporates once we accept determinism. According to Vogt, “every church, without exception, is as such a restriction of the free development of the human spirit, and because I desire a free development of the human spirit in all directions and without limits, I want no restraint on this freedom, and therefore I want no church.”28 Vogt’s motivation for the elimination of the church is grounded in his belief in the value of freedom, yet how, asked Fischer, is this value consistent with Vogt’s determinism? For the materialists, the existence of free will, as it defies any scientific law and was seen as inimical to a scientific picture of the world, must be rejected. The opponents to materialism, however, saw the rejection of free will as undermining moral values and, as they saw faith as a valid route to knowledge, were able to hold on to it. This brings us to the relation between faith and science. More so than today, the debate over materialism focused on questions about the limits of science and the role of religion in our understanding of the world. The materialists saw no need for positing a world beyond that which is accessible to our senses, and where our senses leave off, reason, they held, fills in. Even more, at times they professed the view that science has definitely shown that there is no world beyond our senses. Vogt supported his position primarily by pointing out what he saw were the untoward consequences of rejecting it: a devaluation of life here on earth and the maintenance of a political order that depends on the coercive force of the church. The church for him was the primary 26 

Vogt, op. cit. See Montero (2006) for discussion. Today we would want to say “in as much as it interacts in a deterministic or probabilistic way” and revise the conclusion accordingly. 28  Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 193, from the stenographic report by Wilhelm Vogt, Carl Vogt, p. 66, n. 1. 27 

Philosophy of Mind    365 impediment to human freedom, which (his denial of free will notwithstanding) he saw as necessary for underpinning morality, as essential for underpinning our ability to freely choose the right action. Büchner, though he presented similar reasons to reject the idea of suprasensual knowledge, was also fond of another argument for the idea that there is no world beyond that which we come to know through sense experience. His reasoning seems to be that because we are “only a product of this world and of nature itself,” our experience of the world “must mirror and repeat the laws of nature.”29 Critics again pointed to what they saw as inconsistencies in this picture, arguing that although the materialists call for social action and for individuals to right the wrongs of society, their view leaves no room for right and wrong. Frederick Gregory, in his delightful overview of nineteenth-century German materialism, notes that this inconsistency was perhaps brought out best by Mathilde Reichardt in her letter to another of the central proponents of materialism at the time, the physician Jacob Moleschott: “Sin [you claim] lies in that which is unnatural—but where is there unnaturalness in a world in which each effect corresponds with strict logical consequence to an endless series of causes, all of which themselves are based on a natural necessity?”30 Rudolph Wagner (1854), who saw religious belief as a “new organ of the mind,” argued for the view that faith and science must be kept as two distinct means of knowledge; where the one treads, the other must not go. And like the materialists, Wagner’s arguments were based primarily on the need to avoid the disastrous consequences of rejecting such a view. The natural sciences, he agreed with the materialists, do not suggest an immaterial individual soul, and this is why we need another form of knowledge, for the existence of an immaterial soul is indispensable to the existence of morality (1854, p. 21). Lotze (1852) saw this as “a queer sort of double-entry booking,” and “an unworthy fragmentation of our mental powers” (p. 36). And so the debate went on. Though Friedrich Albert Lange in his 1865 History of Materialism considered the Materialismusstreit settled, looking back it seems an open question as to which side won. Lange gives the anti-materialists the upper hand. Summing up Lange’s conclusion, Bertrand Russell, in his 1925 introduction to the book, puts it like this: “there is no good reason to suppose materialism metaphysically true; it is a point of view which has hitherto proved useful in research, and is likely to continue useful wherever new scientific laws are being discovered, but which may well not cover the whole field, and cannot be regarded as definitely true without a wholly unwarranted dogmatism.” (Lange 1950, p. xix) All three of the prominent materialists lost their jobs. And in 1872, the physiologist Emil Du BoisReymond took himself to be speaking for the scientific community when he said that there is a fundamental limit to what science can tell us about the world, proclaiming, Ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do not know and we will never know).31 The contemporary German philosopher, Michael Heidelberger (2007), however, suggests a way in which the materialists were ultimately victorious. Despite what he sees as their excesses, he thinks that it is fortunate that their criticism of Wagner’s double-entry 29 

30  Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 48. Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 113. The Mathematician David Hilbert later expressed his disagreement: “In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: ‘We must know—we will know!’ [Wir müssen wissen—wir werden wissen!]” This was in 1930. In 1931, however, Gödel proved his famous incompleteness theorem, which might be interpreted as showing that Hilbert’s goal is impossible. 31 

366   Barbara Gail Montero bookkeeping prevailed since it led to what he sees as the general positive attitude toward natural science in Germany. “If the materialists had not won this battle,” as Heidelberger sees it, “the dispute over the role of Darwinism in German secondary education that took place towards the end of the nineteenth century . . . would not have ended as it did,” adding that “American ‘creationism’ is not taken seriously by anyone—across all circles, and entirely independently of political creed or ideology.” We are now quite a distance from what many today think of as standard philosophy of mind, which sees itself as prescinded from religion and politics. Yet, perhaps one lesson we can learn from the Materialismusstreit is that such issues are not always easy to pull apart.

18.5  Eduard von Hartmann’s Theory of the Unconscious Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the German novelist Friedrich von Spielhagen captured the intellectual milieu, in describing a Berlin salon as fixated on two topics: Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which was thought to probe the depths of the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann’s book, Philosophy of the Unconscious, which was thought to explain it. Though discussions of Tristan und Isolde might be overheard today in cafes near Lincoln Center after the curtain goes down, von Hartmann’s book has long faded from the limelight. However, it was certainly in the limelight in the 1870s. Friedrich Nietzsche (1872, p. 262), with characteristic irony, put it this way: “In the entire world one does not speak of the unconscious since, according to its essence, it is unknown; only in Berlin does one speak of and know something about it, and explain to us what actually sets it apart.”32 What, then, was all the brouhaha about? It is of course not true that in the nineteenth century it was only in Berlin that theories of the unconscious were being discussed in the salons of Germany; and it is also not true that it was only von Hartmann’s work that provoked such discussions. For example, before von Hartmann’s book came out, the zoologist polymath Carl Gustav Carus had been lecturing on the unconscious in Dresden, taking the unconscious as the foundation of his theory of the mind. “The key to understanding the conscious life of the soul lies in the realm of the unconscious,” Carus argued in his 1846 book, Psyche: On the Developmental History of the Soul, a book which von Hartmann commented was written with “senile long-windedness and verbosity.”33 However, it was von Hartmann’s perhaps also longwinded, near 1200 page tome that galvanized the German public, going through nine editions between 1868 and 1884, and through its indirect influence likely played a role in inspiring Freud’s theories about the unconscious, such as those that appeared in 1900 in Interpretation of Dreams. What was von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious? What were so many chattering about in the salons and smoke-filled cafes in Berlin in the 1870s? This is not at all an easy question to answer, as von Hartmann acknowledges in an anonymously published 32 

Quoted in Nicholls and Liebscher (2010), Thinking the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 1. 33  Quoted in Nicholls and Liebscher (2010), p. 157.

Philosophy of Mind    367 criticism of his own book wherein he faults the author for failing to define the central topic of inquiry.34 Nonetheless, let me attempt to highlight some of what I see as philosophically interesting about his idea of the unconscious as well as his method for investigating it.35 Having completed his secondary education in 1858, the same year Büchner’s Force and Matter was published, von Hartmann began developing his views on the unconscious at the height of the Materialismusstreit, and his methodology, he claims, is thoroughly in line with materialistic principles (an indication that in the short run the victors of the Materialismusstreit were at least seen by some as the materialists). As von Hartmann’s book’s subtitle, “Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science,” indicates, he took the proper method for philosophy to be empirical, to observe the world through our senses and to provide the best possible explanation of such data. “[A]‌scientific hypothesis,” he (1893b, p. 167) tells us, “should never extend farther than the need of explanation requires.” Conclusions, as such, cannot be known with certainty, but, he thought, when reasoned through carefully, the precepts of his book should be held with the same level of credence as any good scientific theory. So far so good, however, what many later commentators took to be peculiar about his project is just how far beyond the empirical he ultimately ventured.36 Quoting Arthur Schopenhauer, von Hartmann (1893a, p. 57) says, “the materialists endeavor to show that all, even mental phenomena, are physical: and rightly; only they do not see that, on the other hand, everything physical is at the same time metaphysical.” And go beyond the physical—for this is the intended sense of “metaphysical”—he does. Von Hartmann, whose book was published ten years after Darwin’s Origin of the Species, was, like Darwin, concerned with the appearance of teleology in the natural world. How could instinctive behavior, reflex responses, and the body’s ability to repair itself be purposive, yet not consciously so? What explains, von Hartmann (p. 79) wanted to know, “purposive action without consciousness of the purpose”? Von Hartmann thought that Darwin explained the transmission of traits, but not their existence in the first place (a view, as Sebastian Gardner (2010) points out, that seems to imply his rejection of the theory of random mutation), and the best way, he thought, to explain this was to invoke a metaphysical purposive unconscious. Even in explaining intentional action, he thought, we need to posit some type of unconscious purpose, for as he (p. 77) saw it, a decision to lift your finger depends on minute muscular movements about which you are unaware, and in order to explain the purposiveness of the intentional action, these minute muscular movements must be purposive as well: “from the necessity of a voluntary impulse at the point ‘P’ it follows that the conscious will to lift the finger produces an unconscious will to excite point ‘P’.” In this way, conscious intention reduces to mechanical movements, which themselves reduce to something mental; “matter itself” von Hartmann (1893b, p. 86) held,

34  “Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenztheorie,” which along with other work, was added as a third volume to the tenth edition of Philosophie des Unbewussten. 35  This, however, might not line up with what people were talking about in the cafes, for the book, besides addressing the metaphysical nature of consciousness, has chapters on such things as sexual love, ambition, lust of power, vanity, domestic felicity, dreams, and so forth. 36  For example, Lange, op. cit. Von Hartmann does draw a line, though, at least here: “The question might here be raised whether the atoms have a consciousness. However, I think that the data are all too lacking for any decision to be come to thereupon.” Vol. 2, p. 183.

368   Barbara Gail Montero “is in essence nothing else whatever but unconscious mind.” We are already a long way from the materialism of Vogt and Büchner and Moleschott. However, Hartmann takes us even further. From the “impossibility of a mechanical, material solution [to the problem of purposiveness in nature] it follows that the intermediate link must be of a spiritual nature,” he (1893a, p. 77) tells us. And the spiritual nature, according to von Hartmann, involves a synthesis of Schopenhauerian blind impulse and Hegelian reason; beyond our world, according to von Hartmann (1893c, p. 145), lies a unity of Will and Idea: “Will and Idea conceived in metaphysical essential unity, actually suffice for the explanation of the phenomena presented to us in the known world, they form the apex of the pyramid of inductive knowledge.” And now we take the final plunge, for von Hartmann holds that “the Unconscious Will and the Unconscious Idea coalesced to form the one universal spiritual world-essence,” yet ultimately, because of the preponderance of pain over pleasure in the world, the existence of the world is not a good thing. Making Schopenhauer seem veritably cheerful in comparison, von Hartmann tells us (p. 125), “we have seen that in the existing world everything is arranged in the wisest and best manner, and that it may be looked upon as the best of all possible worlds, but that nevertheless it is thoroughly wretched, and worse than none at all.” Thus, humankind’s ultimate purpose is to come to this realization, which will bring about the end of the world. As Sebastian Gardner puts it, on von Hartmann’s view, “[t]‌he world is thus only a device for cancelling the original synthesis of Will and Idea,” only a device for cancelling itself. Lest I end on a pessimistic note, let me conclude with a comment from C. K. Ogden’s 1931 preface to von Hartmann’s book (p. xiii). This comment, I think, also sums up what is most valuable about the work of the other philosophers I have addressed herein. If nothing else, Ogden points out, we must admire von Hartmann for “focusing the attention of the world on an idea.”37

Bibliography Breazeale, D. (1981). “Fichte’s ‘Aenesidemus’ Review and the Transformation of German Idealism,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 34 (3), pp. 545–68. Breazeale, D. (1982). “Between Kant and Fichte:  Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s ‘Elementary Philosophy,’ ” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 35 (4), pp. 785–821. Chomsky, N. (1993). Language and Thought. Wakefield: Moyer Bell. Carus, C. G. (1864). Psyche. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele. Pforzheim: Flammer und Hoffmann. Fichte, J.  G. (1745/1930). Briefwechsel:  Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Schulz, 2nd edition. Leipzig: Haessel. Fichte, J. G. (1794/1988). “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

37 

In von Hartmann, E. (1972), Philosophy of the Unconscious; Speculative Results according to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, one volume edition (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers) p. xiii.

Philosophy of Mind    369 Fischer, K. (1853). Die Unwahrheit des Sensualismus und Materialismus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Schriften von Feuerbach, Vogt und Moleschott bewiesen. Erlangen:  T. Bläsing. Forster, M. N. (1998). Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gardner, S. (2010). “Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious,” in Thinking the Unconscious:  Nineteenth-Century German Thought, ed. Nicholls and Liebscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, I. I., Harel, M., and Malach, R. (2006). “When the Brain Loses Its Self: Prefrontal Inactivation during Sensorimotor Processing,” Neuron, Vol. 50 (2), pp. 329–39. Gregory, F. (1977). Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Hartmann, E. von (1893a). Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, Volume 1, trans. Coupland. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd. Hartmann, E. von (1893b). Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, Volume 2, trans. Coupland. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd. Hartmann, E. von (1893c). Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, Volume 3, trans. Coupland. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd. Hartmann, E. von (1972). Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results according to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, one volume edition. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1807/1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1830/1971). Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1830/1975). Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philo­ sophical Sciences, trans. Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1802/1907). Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Heidelberger, M. (2007). “Freedom and Science! The Presumptuous Metaphysics of Free Will Disdainers,” in Psychology’s Territories:  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Different Disciplines, ed. Ash and Sturm. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Johnston, N. E., Atlas, L. Y., and Wager, T. D. (2012). “Opposing Effects of Expectancy and Somatic Focus on Pain,” PLoS ONE, Vol. 7 (6): e38854. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038854. Kind, A. (2013). “The Case Against Representationalism about Moods,” in Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge. Kriegel, U. (2003). “Consciousness as Intransitive Self-Consciousness:  Two Views and an Argument,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 33 (1), pp. 103–32. Lange, F. A. (1950). The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, trans. Thomas. London: Degan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. (Originally published in 1866, a revised edition in three volumes in 1873–5.) Levine, J. (2006). “Conscious Awareness and (Self-)Representation,” in Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, ed. Kriegel and Williford. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lotze, R. H. (1852). Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele, Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung.

370   Barbara Gail Montero Messina, J. (2011). “Answering Aenesidemus:  Schulze’s Attack on Reinholdian Representationalism and Its Importance for Fichte,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 49 (3), pp. 339–69. Montero, B. (1999). “The Body Problem,” Noûs, Vol. 33 (2), pp. 183–200. Montero, B. (2005). “What is the Physical?” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Beckermann, McLaughlin, and Walter. New York: Oxford University Press. Montero, B. (2006). “What Does the Conservation of Energy Have to Do with Physicalism?” Dialectica, Vol. 60 (4), pp. 383–96. Montero, B. (forthcoming). The Myth of ‘Just do It’:  Thought and Effort in Expert Action. New York: Oxford University Press. Nicholls, Angus and Liebscher, Martin (2010). Thinking the Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1872–4). Nachgelassene Fragmente, Sommer, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, Vol. IV, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978. Reinhold, K. L. (1789). Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens. Jena: C. Widtmann und J. M. Mauke. Reinhold, K. L. (1790). Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen. Jena: J. M. Mauke. Rushton, J. (2006). Mozart. New York: Oxford University Press. Russell, B. (1927/1961). An Outline of Philosophy. London: George Allen and Unwin. Saul, J. (2013). “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat and Women in Philosophy,” in Women in Philosophy:  What Needs to Change?, ed. Hutchison and Jenkins. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Schellenberg, S. (2010). “The Particularity and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 149, pp. 19–48. Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vogt, C. (1864). Lectures on Man: His place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth, ed. James Hunt. London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, Paternoster Row, lecture three. Wagner, R. (1854). Ueber Wissen und Glauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen. Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen über “Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz.” Göttingen: Wigand. First published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung on January 1, 1852, pp. 18, 14f.

Chapter 19

Phil osoph y of L a nguage Hans-Johann Glock 19.1 Introduction Any subject X can turn into a topic of philosophical reflection and thus precipitate a philosophy of X. But the concern with some topics is central to philosophy. Language is one of them. Its perennial importance has three distinct though related roots. First, there is the role of language in sustaining specifically human forms of communication and interaction. Secondly, there is the vexed relation between thought and language. Thirdly, there is the question of whether philosophical problems, claims and theories, by contrast to those of science, concern or are rooted in language rather than reality. All three issues loom large in nineteenth-century Germanophone philosophy of language. But that tradition divides into three strands. These do not constitute genuine traditions, let  alone schools. Nonetheless, they differ in orientation and, to some extent, developed independently.1 For want of better terms, I shall refer to them, respectively, as the hermeneutic strand, the logical strand and the critique of language. For present purposes, the hermeneutic tradition comprises not just the ‘classical’ hermeneuticians of the nineteenth century, namely Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Dilthey, but also its all-important eighteenth-century roots (Hamann, Herder), as well as associates within Sturm und Drang, Romanticism (Schleiermacher, Schlegel, von Humboldt), and German Idealism (mainly Hegel). The logical strand consists of what has come to be known as the ‘Austrian tradition in philosophy’ (mainly Bolzano) and of Frege, a singular figure as regards both his academic roots and his intellectual accomplishments. The critique of language consists of otherwise diverse figures like Lichtenberg, Gruppe, Nietzsche, and Mauthner. Its interactions, both positively and negatively, are mainly with the hermeneutic strand; yet it shares the quest for clarity with the logical strand. The ideas of language as the medium of communication, the glue of society and a driving force of history are clearly more prominent in the hermeneutic tradition. The idea of language as a source of (philosophical) problems and confusions is the defining feature

1  In general, I shall claim ties of influence between X and Y only in cases in which there is concrete evidence, not on currently popular grounds of the form ‘Y must have been familiar with X’.

372   Hans-Johann Glock of the critique of language, while also playing a role in the logical strand. And the idea of language as a resource for resolving such problems and for facilitating the quest for knowledge is most evident in the logical strand. Finally, the relationship between thought and language has exercised all three currents in roughly equal measure. Nevertheless this chapter will accord more space to the hermeneutic strand. This is not to lend succour to those myopic enough to reduce Germanophone philosophy after Kant to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, or to extol German Idealism and Lebensphilosophie as ‘classical’ German philosophy. Rather, the Germanophone roots of analytic philosophy have by now been widely recognized. By comparison, the considerable contributions of the hermeneutic strand to the philosophy of language remain underappreciated in the Anglophone world. Ironically, this holds not just for mainstream analytic philosophers, but also for those interested in so-called ‘continental philosophy’ mainly as an antidote to Enlightenment ideals and as a source of political and cultural ideologies. In any event, in addition to sketching the story of the different strands, there will also be some comparisons and juxtapositions, both between and within them. In this respect, the following highly general oppositions will loom large:

• • • • • • • •

lingualism vs. Platonism and mentalism, psychologism and empiricism vs. anti-psychologism and a priorism, individualism vs. communitarianism, universalism vs. pluralism, absolutism vs. relativism, constancy and precision of meaning vs. instability and vagueness, language as a medium of thought vs. language as a tool or calculus, ordinary vs. ideal language.

19.2  Kant’s Legacy: the Reflective Turn There have been sporadic attempts to detect a systematic and novel philosophy of language and even a linguistic turn in Kant.2 This is a case in which the time honoured maxim ‘If it’s in Kant, it must be good!’ has been supplemented by the even more suspect ‘If it’s good, it must be in Kant!’. Kant’s importance for our topic does not lie in his scattered and largely unoriginal remarks about language. Instead, it lies in the general impact of his ‘Copernican Revolution’ on nineteenth-century thought, and in particular on the self-image of philosophy. From Kant onwards, one concern has united many otherwise diverse strands of Germanophone philosophy, namely whether philosophy can preserve a distinct role in view of the progress of the empirical sciences.3 This question was linked to a second 2  W. Hogrebe, Kant und das Problem einer transzendentalen Semantik, Freiburg: Alber, 1974; more circumspectly J. Simon, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie, ed. T. Borsche, München: Beck, 1996. 3  H. Schnädelbach, German Philosophy 1831–1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Philosophy of Language    373 one, namely whether philosophy is a priori. If philosophy is to be a cognitive discipline, yet distinct from empirical science, this is because, like logic and mathematics, it aspires to knowledge of a non-empirical kind. One explanation of such knowledge is the kind of Platonism favoured by Bolzano and Frege: logic and mathematics are a priori because they deal with entities (numbers, concepts, thoughts, truth-values) beyond the physical realm. Another explanation was provided by Kant. Philosophy is immune to confirmation or refutation by empirical evidence not because it deals with abstract entities beyond the empirical world, but because it reflects on the non-empirical preconditions of empirical knowledge, logical or cognitive structures that antecede contingent matters of empirical fact. Traditional metaphysics sought insights into either a reality beyond space and time (Platonism) or the most abstract and general features of reality (Aristotelianism). Kant brought about a fundamental re-orientation by turning the metaphysical quest for a priori knowledge of a substantive kind into a ‘critique of pure reason’, that is, a second-order reflection on the non-empirical aspects of the way in which ordinary reality is given to us in experience, or, more generally, of the way in which we represent reality. This reflective turn4 lends itself to a linguistic transformation. If the representation of reality or human thought in general are essentially tied to language, the reflection on the ‘transcendental’ preconditions of thought turns into a reflection on the nature and structure of the linguistic expression of thought. At a grand-strategic level, the achievement of Kant’s contemporaries Hamann and Herder consists in having effected such a transformation, treating language rather than reason as the precondition of thought. The point is evident from the fact that both published self-proclaimed metacritiques of Kant’s critical philosophy—respectively, Metakritik über den Purismus der Vernunft 17845 and Metakritik zur Kritik der Vernunft 1799.6 Thus Hamann accuses Kant of a misguided ‘purification of philosophy’, which consists of ignoring the three-fold dependence of reason on ‘transmission, tradition and faith therein’, on ‘experience and its everyday induction’, and on ‘language, the first and ultimate organ and criterion of reason, without any foundation other than transmission and custom’.7 Hamann and Herder stand in an ambivalent relation to the Enlightenment more generally. Motivated by his Protestant faith, Hamann passionately repudiated the ideals of progress, rationality, and a common human nature. Herder was less of an irrationalist and Christian apologetic. Yet he was equally sceptical of the idea of a universal though progressing human nature, and instead stressed the contingencies of human history and the diversity of human societies. Furthermore, like Hamann he tried to undermine the 4  H. J. Glock, ‘Philosophy, Thought and Language’, in Thought and Language, ed. J. Preston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 5  Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. J. Nadler, 7 Vols., Wien 1947–1957, Vol. III, pp. 281–9. 6  Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. M. Bollacher et al., Frankfurt am Main 1985, Vol. VIII, pp. 303–640. 7 Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, p. 284. For Hamann, the focus on language avoids in particular the Kantian idea that sensibility and understanding constitute two separate branches of human cognition (albeit with a common root), since both are united in language. He also insists on the ‘genealogical priority’ of language over logic (‘Metakritik’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 286–7).

374   Hans-Johann Glock orthodox distinctions of faculty psychology, notably those between reason, will, desire, and affection. Rather, a human being is a unity infused by a Kraft, a spiritual or vital force. On the other hand, Hamann’s and Herder’s preoccupation with language reflects a central Enlightenment topos. For epistemological reasons, the Enlightenment was interested in the connection between thought and language; for anthropological reasons, it was concerned with the difference between human and animal communication and with the origins of language and its relation to the progress of human reason. In his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache8 Herder propounded the progressive view that language is a human edifice; it is divine only to the extent to which humans are God’s creation. He also recognized that language resulted from gradual processes rather than a spontaneous invention. Finally, the striking first sentence ‘Already as an animal, man possesses language’9 anticipates a profound anthropological insight, namely that the capacity for language is part of a specifically human yet nonetheless completely natural form of life. Hamann condemned Herder’s secular explanation as incoherent and defended the divine origins of language.10 In this context, he invoked a pet idea of his that proved to be subliminally influential, namely that God speaks to us not just through the scriptures, but also through nature and through history.11 Then again, in tying thought closely to language both Hamann and Herder were indebted to the Enlightenment thinkers Leibniz and Wolff.12 Finally, it is the aforementioned Kantian background which explains why for the hermeneutic strand language is not just one part of reality among others to be investigated by metaphysics or science, but central to the very task of philosophy.

19.3  The Linguistic Turn of Hamann and Herder Hamann and Herder anticipated the linguistic turn of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. For them, language is not primarily a means of reference to non-linguistic objects and a means of conveying non-linguistic thoughts; rather, language expresses and constitutes thought. According to Forster, they advanced two more specific fundamental theses:  (1)  ‘thought is essentially dependent on and bound by language’ and (2)  ‘meaning 8 

9  Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 697. Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 695–810. For example, ‘Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 35–53. Hamann is also famous for opining that ‘poetry is the mother tongue of the human race’ (Aesthetica in nuce, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 197). 11  ‘Ritter von Rosencreuz’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 31–2; ‘Aesthetica in nuce’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, pp. 204–7; An Immanuel Kant, Dezember 1759, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer, Arthur Schenkel, Wiesbaden, 1955–79, Vol. I, p. 450. 12  See Michael N. Forster, After Herder, Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 61–4, 67–8 and Michael N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language, From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 286–95 for the impact of earlier biblical exegetes like Ernesti on Herder’s hermeneutics. Let me add that although twentieth-century scholars of the hermeneutic tradition like Apel, Coseriu, and Berlin rightly stressed important similarities between Vico, Hamann, and Herder, it is almost certain that the former did not actually influence the latter. 10 

Philosophy of Language    375 consists in word-usage’, that is, the meanings of words (the concepts expressed by them) are not non-linguistic entities they refer to (whether material, abstract, or mental), but rather ‘usages of words’.13 There is a ‘priority dispute’ over who actually founded this ‘Herder-Hamann tradition’,14 and thereby my hermeneutic strand. The received picture is that the wayward yet profound Hamann inspired Herder, who publicized and popularized his views.15 And there is no doubt that Hamann, the elder of the two, nurtured Herder’s interest in language, and taught him foreign languages. However, Forster has argued convincingly that Herder propounded (1) and (2) already in the 1760s,16 when Hamann was still wedded to a more orthodox view that at most concedes a mutual dependence of thought and language.17 As regards the lingualist thesis (1), Herder claimed in 1767–8 that language ‘is the form of cognition, not merely in which but also in accordance with which thoughts take shape, where in all parts of literature thought sticks to expression, and forms itself in accordance with this. . . . Language sets limits and contour for all human cognition’.18 A later summary has it that ‘language is the character of our reason’.19 As regards the use theory (2), Herder maintained that in determining the concept aka meaning of an expression the question is not how it ‘can etymologically be derived and analytically determined, but how it is used’.20 ‘Let us seek a word’s concept not from etymologies, which are always uncertain, but according to the clear use [Gebrauch] of the name in its various times’.21 Nevertheless, there are noteworthy complications. First, in several places, including his most famous contribution to the philosophy of language, the Abhandlung, Herder’s lingualism reduces to the contention that thought depends on language because it amounts to a form of inner speech, with concepts/meanings being the words of this language of thought.22 This doctrine is far less original; it boasts illustrious advocates from Plato through Occam to Fodor. Hamann censured Herder for adopting it.23 Rightly so, his failure to adduce arguments notwithstanding. As the anti-psychologism of the logical

13 Forster, After Herder, pp. 2, 16.

14 Forster, German Philosophy of Language, p. 254. For example, Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder, London: Hogarth, 1976. 16 Forster, After Herder, pp. 1–3, 13, 17, 56–8, ch. 9; Forster, German Philosophy of Language, ch. 8. 17  For example, ‘Versuch über eine akademische Frage’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, pp. 119–26. 18  ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, 1. Sammlung, zweite völlig umgearbeitete Ausgabe’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 556–7. See also ‘Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 27; ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, 1. Sammlung’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 177. 19  ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit II’, 9, 2, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. VI, p. 348. See also ‘Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. IV, pp. 358–9. 20  ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, 3. Sammlung’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 421–3. 21  ‘Vom Geiste der Ebräischen Poesie’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. V, p. 1007. For the rejection of referential conceptions of meaning associated with (2), see Hamann an Johann Gottfried Herder, 27–9 April 1781, Briefwechsel, Vol. IV, p. 287 (anti-Platonism), René de Rapin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. IV, pp. 59–60 (anti-mentalism), and Herder, ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit II’, 9, 2, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. VI, pp. 348–50; see Forster, After Herder, pp. 65–7, 305. 22  ‘Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 733, ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, 1. Sammlung, zweite völlig umgearbeitete Ausgabe’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 558, ‘Metakritik’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. VIII, p. 389. 23  ‘René de Rapin’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. IV, pp. 59–60. 15 

376   Hans-Johann Glock tradition culminating in Wittgenstein has shown, inner speech is no more necessary or sufficient for thinking than mental images; and the idea of a language of thought beyond the reaches of the subject’s consciousness (notably one implemented by neural firings) is incoherent. For this reason, what one might call process lingualism is untenable. Thinking is not constituted by a process of inner speech accompanying outer discourse. Capacity lingualism, according to which only creatures capable of expressing them linguistically can have thoughts, is more plausible. Yet the actual kernel of truth in lingualism, or so I have argued, is this. Ascribing thoughts makes sense only in cases where we have criteria for identifying thoughts. Something must count as thinking that p rather than that q. Accordingly thoughts, although they need not actually be verbalized either externally or internally, must be capable of being manifested. And only a very restricted range of thoughts can be expressed in non-linguistic behavior.24 By the same token, however, it is wrong simply to identify thought and language, as Hamann seems to: ‘reason is language, logos’.25 Leaving aside whether Hamann took reason to be equivalent to thought, this purple passage cannot be defended by insisting that logos includes inner speech. But there are mitigating considerations. In other passages Hamann treats language merely as an essential precondition of thought, thereby implying that they are not identical. 26 Furthermore, his conception of language includes forms of expression beyond linguistic symbols (understood in Peirce’s sense as signs governed by convention), such as music and visual art. Such a ‘broad expressivism’ was later adopted by Hegel, Schlegel, and Dilthey. 27 It is correct in so far as non-linguistic sign systems and media—whether iconic or not—can have a meaning in the sense of expressing concepts and thoughts. It is more contentious whether they can express thoughts that transcend linguistic explanation. Mysticism notwithstanding, any bona fide thinking must allow of being specified as a case of thinking that such-and-such, and hence of linguistic specification. And in the last instance, the established idiom of natural languages remains the ultimate medium for the disambiguation and explication of what precisely is being expressed by other types of signs. In any event, if broad expressivism is tenable, it makes identifying thought with language more palatable. Secondly, Herder only propounds the ‘epistemological’ claim that the meaning of a word is to be gathered from its use. Hamann advances the stronger, ‘metaphysical’ claim that meaning is determined by use: words turn from mere objects of the senses into ‘understanding and concepts’ through the ‘spirit of their employment’.28 As far as I can tell, however, neither Herder nor Hamann simply identifies the meaning of a word with its use. Good for them! The thesis that meaning is identical with use founders, if only because there are significant differences between the use of ‘use of (way of using) an expression’

24 

Glock, op.cit. An Johann Gottfried Herder, 6–10 August 1784, Briefwechsel, Vol. V, p. 177. 26  ‘So true is it that language and writing are the most essential organs and conditions of all human instruction, more essential and absolute than light for seeing and sound for hearing’ (An Immanuel Kant, April 1774, Briefwechsel, Vol. III, p. 87; ‘Prolegomena über die neueste Auslegung der ältesten Urkunde’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, p. 130. 27 Forster, After Herder, pp. 31, 365–6 and Forster, German Philosophy of Language, p. 299. 28 ‘Metakritik’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, p. 288. 25 

Philosophy of Language    377 and that of ‘meaning of an expression’. By contrast, the claim that meaning is determined by and hence evident in use is defensible, provided that it recognizes the normative dimension of use.29 Thirdly, in addition to broad expressivism, Hamann rather than Herder introduced two other seminal ideas into the hermeneutic tradition. First, semantic holism: ‘Like numbers, words receive their value from the place they occupy, and their concepts, in their determinations and relations, are like coins, mutable depending on location and time’.30 Secondly, a communitarian perspective, which stresses the social character of language. Although Herder occasionally suggested such a view, he vehemently rejected it in the Abhandlung. The origin of language lies in the solitary reflection— Besonnenheit—of individuals. To impose order on the sensory input, they engage in a process of abstraction and thereby isolate specific properties (Merkmal) of objects, which are assigned an inner label (Merkwort) that is subsequently vocalized. ‘The very last thing’ responsible for the genesis of language was ‘consensus, arbitrary convention of society. The savage, alone by himself in the forest, would have had to invent language, even if he had never used it. It was consensus of his soul with itself, a consensus so inevitable as humans being humans’.31 For this individualism Herder was taken to task by Hamann in Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel, 32 yet it later endeared him to Chomsky.33

19.4  Classical Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Dilthey What one might call ‘classical’ German hermeneutics developed the aforementioned ideas of the Herder-Hamann tradition, primarily through applying them to problems concerning interpretation and translation. Schleiermacher and Schlegel took on board Herder’s lingualism, often in the version that identifies thought with inner speech. In Schleiermacher we also encounter intimations of the Wittgensteinian view that linguistic meaning depends not on all features of linguistic use (for instance, on the effects of specific utterances on the hearer or on socio-linguistic conditions), but only on rules of correct use. In his hermeneutics lectures he maintained that ‘the meaning of a word is to be derived from the unity of the word-sphere and from the rules governing the presupposition of this unity’.34 This passage also indicates Schleiermacher’s development of semantic holism. The prima facie distinct senses of certain words nonetheless form part of a larger ‘word-sphere’. Furthermore, any specific word or concept is partly defined by its place within a ‘system

29 

Glock, ‘Abusing Use’, Dialectica 50, 1996, pp. 205–23. ‘Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 71. 31  ‘Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 725. 32  Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, pp. 35–53. 33  Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper and Row, 1966. 34  See Forster, After Herder, pp. 328–9, 366; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. H. Kimmerle, Heidelberg: Winter, 1959 (2nd ed. 1974), pp. 38, 63. 30 

378   Hans-Johann Glock of concepts’,35 an idea which came to fruition in what Strawson calls ‘connective analysis’. Finally, the grammar of a particular language contributes to the concepts it expresses. By implication, the syntactic features of specific lexical items are partly constitutive of their meaning. This is inimical to the strict separation of syntax and semantics advocated by Chomsky’s generative grammar, yet congenial to the project of a ‘logical grammar’ launched by Husserl and Wittgenstein. Schleiermacher rightly perceives holism as an obstacle to linguistic understanding. ‘Any speech’ is intelligible only ‘within the totality of language’, indeed, ‘only in the context of the whole life, to which it belongs’,36 and ultimately within a broader cultural context. When it comes to interpretation, for instance, the reader faces a pervasive and unavoidable circularity. The individual parts of a text need to be understood in the light of the whole; conversely, the whole text can only be understood by understanding its constituent parts. Schleiermacher’s solution consists in recognizing that understanding, far from being an all-or-nothing affair, comes in degrees and can therefore be achieved by a gradual process. Having worked through parts of the text, we arrive at a preliminary interpretation of the whole, which in turn is applied to modifying the understanding of certain parts, and so on. This commonsensical procedure achieved more fame than it deserves under the label ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Dilthey) and ‘circle of understanding’ (Gadamer). Schleiermacher and Schlegel inherited the recognition of another obstacle from Herder. The latter expounded a ‘principle of radical difference’.37 There is an ‘immeasurable’ and ‘absolute’ difference38 between different human societies, cultures, and languages, both synchronically and diachronically. Worse still, there are even conceptual differences between different contemporaneous members of a single speech-community.39 Acknowledging conceptual diversity marks a salutary break with the universalism that unites Kant’s transcendental system of forms of intuition and understanding with Davidson’s attack on the conceivability of alternative conceptual schemes. It is a plausible (though not inevitable) development of lingualism. If our conceptual scheme is constituted by language, it would appear to inherit two features of language-diversity and change: synchronically, there are genuinely different natural languages, and diachronically, these languages change over time. Yet two notes of caution are in place. Conceptual pluralism does not entail the conceptual relativism condoned, among others, by Herder in a moderate and by Nietzsche in an emphatic fashion. It is perfectly compatible with holding that some conceptual schemes are superior to others in logical, metaphysical, or epistemological respects, an idea to which otherwise diverse figures like von Humboldt, Hegel, and Frege were committed. Secondly, the question remains whether there are nonetheless conceptual and/or anthropological limitations to conceptual diversity, and whether a 35  Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Vorlesung über die Dialektik’, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. H. J. Birkner et al., Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1984, Vol. II, p. 10. 36  Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Einleitung 5’, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. M. Frank, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 77–8. 37 Forster, After Herder, pp. 17, 51n11 and Forster, German Philosophy of Language, p. 257. 38  ‘Friedrich Schlegels Philosophie der Philologie, mit einer Einleitung von Josef Körner’ (with an introduction by Josef Körner), Logos 17, 1928, pp. 16–17. Cf. ‘Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur I’, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler et al., Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1981, Vol. 16, pp. 35–81. 39  Herder, ‘Von der Veränderung des Geschmacks’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 149–60.

Philosophy of Language    379 common core of concepts and ultimately of forms of behaviour is not a precondition of the possibility of understanding linguistic utterances.40 How then is understanding to be achieved in the face of these obstacles? Schleiermacher’s response lies in a holistic approach, which revolves around two aspects of understanding: ‘Just as any speech stands in a two-fold relation, to the totality of language and to the entire thinking of its author, all understanding consists of two aspects, understanding the speech as taken from language, and understanding it as facts within the thinker’.41 To these two aspects of understanding there correspond two aspects of interpretation. The ‘grammatical’, that is, linguistic, side considers words in the contexts of sentences and places such larger units within the context of a shared linguistic practice. The ‘technical’, that is, psychological, side reconstructs the genesis of an utterance or text from the mental biography of the author.42 According to Schleiermacher, the two sides roughly correspond to two different methods, which he took over from Herder.43 The linguistic side of interpretation employs the ‘comparative method’, which is one of extrapolating the rules of use from specific uses. By contrast, the psychological side is at least partly a matter of a ‘divination’ into the author’s soul. In one respect, this is less problematic than it may sound, since it means that psychological interpretation is a process of fallible hypothesis;44 but it is mistaken to imply that extrapolating semantically relevant rules of use reduces to induction by enumeration and is bar of hypothetical conjectures. Schleiermacher’s paradigm of divination influenced Dilthey, who suggested that interpretation is a matter of projecting oneself into the interpretee’s subjective frame of mind by reliving his experiences.45 Something similar was suggested by Herder: psychological interpretation requires Einfühlung, which involves reproducing the interpretee’s sensations in the imagination. These subjectivist approaches have been criticized by objectivist hermeneuticians like Gadamer. Indeed, ever since Schleiermacher and Dilthey, there have been heated debates about the relative importance of objective linguistic vs. subjective

40 

Glock, ‘Relativism, Commensurability and Translatability’, Ratio Vol. XX, 2007, pp. 377–402. Schleiermacher, ‘Einleitung 5’, Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 77. 42  ‘Die grammatische Auslegung’, Hermeneutik und Kritik, pp. 101, 116. 43  ‘Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. IV, pp. 365 ff.; ‘Über Thomas Abbts Schriften’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. II, p. 565–608. 44 Forster, After Herder, pp. 21–2, 333–4. 45  Especially in ‘Leben Schleiermachers’ (W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985, Vol. XIV, p. 2) and ‘Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie’, (Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, pp. 139–240). In his later work Dilthey moved away from this psychologistic gloss. For example, ‘Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik’, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, pp. 317–31. Instead of speculating about what subjective inner state caused another’s actions the latter are seen as expressions within an intersubjective context, constituted by ‘objectifications of life’. These objectifications constitute a social and cultural practice that endows our actions with meaning. To this context, language and cultural climate contribute equally. On Dilthey see Makkreel, R., ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at . Schleiermacher, in his considered pronouncements, assigns equal weight to the grammatical and the technical side (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, Gesammelte Schriften, p. 77). 41 

380   Hans-Johann Glock psychological factors, both exegetically as regards the writings of eminent hermeneuticians and substantively, as regards the nature of meaning and understanding.46 Some of the sting can be taken out of the second debate by heeding the aforementioned idea that understanding comes in degrees, and may indeed have distinct objects. Thus the linguistic side concerns lexical meaning and what token utterances literally say, whereas the psychological side concerns different phenomena like speaker’s meaning, illocutionary force, and conversational implicatures. As regards the former, intersubjective conventions in force in the speaker’s linguistic community are decisive. As regards the latter, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey are right in that something like the intentions of a speaker or author are relevant to what she meant to say, the thoughts she meant to convey, irrespective of what she actually said, given the conventions of a speech community. It is wrong, however, to maintain that the relevant intentions can be read off sensations, mental images or words that cross a subject’s mind when she speaks or writes. What a speaker or author means depends instead on the sincere explanations that she would or could give of her words—it is a matter of linguistic potentialities rather than mental actualities.47 But it took Wittgenstein’s radical transformation of Frege’s anti-psychologism to attain that prima facie counterintuitive insight. Furthermore, in cases in which we cannot ask the speaker what she meant, something like Einfühlung has a legitimate role to play, not in the literal yet abstruse sense of ‘feeling one’s way into’ another person’s mind, but in the sense of empathy informed by knowledge of the subject’s biography and her social context. A currently popular maxim is Quine’s and Davidson’s (mislabelled) ‘principle of charity’, according to which interpretation must avoid attributing to a speaker or text beliefs that are obviously or predominantly false. Ironically, this ‘hermeneutic’ principle does not make an appearance in classical Germanophone hermeneutics. Indeed, Schlegel explicitly defended the possibility of attributing to a text views which are not just confused but downright inconsistent.48 Now, there is a strong case for denying that a subject can believe explicit contradictions.49 Nevertheless, one can hold beliefs which turn out to be contradictory, that is, which defy being spelled out in a coherent fashion. And when it comes to interpreting texts, even the ascription of explicit contradictions is not off limits. For a text is not an immediate expression of a single doxastic state. It may instead manifest beliefs which the author held at different stages of composition. Because of inattention an author may also fail to recognize that a view expressed on page X is incompatible with one expressed on page Y, or he may simply have committed a slip in writing down the text. Furthermore, the principle of charity entreats interpreters to project their own beliefs and desires onto the interpretees. Closing one’s heart to such misguided charity makes room not just for counting the interpretees wrong, for instance on account of radically divergent 46 

See Forster, After Herder, pp. 371–9. Glock and Preston, ‘Externalism and First Person Authority’, The Monist, Vol. 78, 1995, pp. 515–34. 48  ‘Philosophische Fragmente’, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler et al., Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1958, Vol. XVIII, p. 63, Erste Epoche II, 1796–1798, p. 227, Zweite Epoche I, 1798–1799. 49  If someone utters a sentence of the form ‘p & ~ p’ without qualifying it (e.g. concerning time or respect), this is a criterion for his not having understood that sentence, and therefore incompatible with his thereby expressing the alleged belief. If so, it is unclear how one could entertain beliefs of this kind without undermining one’s status as a genuine subject of beliefs. 47 

Philosophy of Language    381 practices. It may transpire that on some issues they not only hold different views, but that they are right and we are wrong! In approaching a foreign text or culture, we must keep in mind the possibility that we might have something to learn. That is one lesson of the hermeneutic tradition which its analytic admirers have yet to assimilate.50 On this issue the Herder-tradition differs from Quine and Davidson, for better rather than worse. On a related issue, it joins hands with them, for worse rather than better. Schleiermacher notoriously opines that ‘misunderstanding’ rather than mutual understanding ‘occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point’.51 This view was endorsed by Dilthey.52 Both were motivated by the desire to promote hermeneutics as a universal discipline, whose complex canons apply to all (Dilthey) or at any rate to all linguistic (Schleiermacher) manifestations of meaning, humdrum exchanges within a single speech community included. In a similar vein, though for different reasons, Quine and Davidson contend that ‘radical translation’, that is, the kind of interpretation from scratch occasionally performed by field linguists, ‘begins at home’. These positions grossly overintellectualize the basic and paradigmatic case of everyday communication, by assimilating it to the challenges facing philologists or anthropologists. Although misunderstandings can always arise in a specific case and occasion the need for (re-)interpretation, it does not follow that they do arise in every single case. It does not even follow that they could arise in all cases. Without shared conventional meaning, communication would have to be based on immensely complex mutual conjectures by speakers of different idiolects. Even if that were feasible in principle, it would be the very opposite of linguistic communication. Natural languages are shared practices that we have mastered through enculturation and that allow us to understand the utterances of subjects, without sharing most of their convictions or intentions, and without complex theory-formation.53

19.5  The Birth of Western Linguistics: Schlegel and von Humboldt Von Humboldt’s perspective on language is anthropological in the spirit of Herder and Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. It unites a priori with empirical reflections54 in a way that is both stimulating and problematic, foreshadowing a similar combination in Chomsky. Its guiding theme is the contrast between universality and particularity, especially in three areas: first, language in general vs. specific natural languages; secondly, linguistic communities vs. individual speakers; thirdly, language as a system of syntactic and semantic rules vs. language as speech (de Saussure’s langue vs. parole contrast). 50 Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 109–14.

51 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, p. 86, and Schleiermacher, Einleitung, Hermeneutik und Kritik, pp. 15, 92. 52  Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. XIV, p. 2. 53  See Glock, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge Uuniversity Press, 2003, pp. 201–7. 54  ‘Bildung des Menschen’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, ed. A. Leitzmann, Berlin: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1903–36, Vol. I, p. 286.

382   Hans-Johann Glock Language is central to the anthropological equation, since we are ‘human exclusively through language’.55 Humboldt adumbrates lingualism by insisting that language is not just an ‘instrument’ for the communication of prefigured thoughts, but an organon, quite literally an inner ‘organ which shapes thought’.56 Like Herder, Humboldt regards the specifically human capacity for reflection as the driving force behind the formation of language. But his gloss on this idea is distinctively Kantian. Language is a precondition for an individual recognizing distinct objects within the flux of experiences: ‘The essence of language consists in moulding the world of appearances into thoughts; its whole aim is formal’. Language is also a precondition for the individual recognizing himself as a subject distinct from these objects.57 Through language, the subject constitutes (bildet) both himself and the world, yet only in the innocuous sense of becoming conscious of himself by separating (abscheiden) himself from the world.58 The subject becomes even more of an object for himself through having his own linguistic expressions reflected by other ‘representing and thinking creatures’. This step constitutes the essential intersubjective dimension of language: ‘All speech rests on dialogue (Wechselrede)’.59 Humboldt not only proposed a new rationale for a communitarian perspective. Under the influence of Schlegel, he also devised a more comprehensive version of holism. Language is more than an aggregate of elements, not just as regards its lexicon, as in semantic holism, but also as regards its grammar. In fact, it is the grammar of a language that individuates it (unifies it and sets it apart from others). A  language is like a ‘web’, ‘meshwork’, or ‘net’, and each uttered expression ‘intimates [antönt] and presupposes the whole of language’.60 This holism extends the idea of language as an organ of individual reflection to the idea that intersubjectively shared languages are in fact akin to organisms—the so-called ‘organic model of language’. The invocation of a super-individual agent is reminiscent of the Hegelian ‘spirit’. Humboldt and Schlegel also link it to the idea that languages are the genuine and defining expression of something like a Volksseele, an idea already mooted by Herder.61 The organic model is intimately linked to von Humboldt’s conviction that there is a universal human nature, yet one which is characterized precisely by the variety of its manifestations in different societies and languages.62 ‘Thought is dependent not just on language 55 

‘Das vergleichende Sprachstudium’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 15. ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, pp. 53, 14 and Vol. VI, p. 151. 57 ‘Sprachstudium’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 17, see also ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, pp. 52–5, 151–303, ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, p. 582. 58  Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. S. Seidel, 2 Vols., Berlin, 1962, p. 207. 59  ‘Über den Dualis’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VI, pp. 25–6, see also ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachgebrauchs’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 160, 172. 60  ‘Das vergleichende Sprachstudium’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 15, ‘Verschiedenheit’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, p. 278. 61  Through reflecting on the genesis not of language but of particular languages, one can capture the ‘spirit’ or ‘character of a nation’ (Geist der Nation, Nationalcharakter); ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur’, for example, Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 376. 62  ‘Entwicklung der menschlichen Kräfte’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, p. 86, and ‘Einleitung in das gesamte Sprachstudium’, Vol. VII, p. 622. 56 

Philosophy of Language    383 as such, but, up to a certain point, on each individual language’.63 Natural languages ‘are not really means of presenting the already discovered truth, but, far more, of discovering the previously unrecognized truth’. As a result, their diversity is not just the superficial one of different ‘sounds and signs, but a diversity of worldviews (Weltansichten) themselves’.64 The main task of linguistics is therefore ‘comparative grammar’. The idea that different natural languages constitute radically distinct modes of thought and even perception was later picked up by Whorf. At the same time, there is a countervailing tendency. Von Humboldt reckons with an underlying universal grammar—a view famously reclaimed by Chomsky. But while Chomskian universalism is definitely incompatible with the linguistic relativism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, von Humboldt’s own position is coherent and anticipates insights of contemporary interactionism.65 The features shared by all languages are rooted in requirements on communication imposed by a common human nature, while the important differences are due to a cultural diversification which other aspects of human nature strongly favour.66 Like human nature so conceived, language is essentially dynamic; ‘it is not a product (Ergon) but an activity (Energeia)’.67 Among other things, this implies an interdependence between speech and language. While speech-communities provide individual speakers with the organon of shared natural languages, the latter are in turn constituted by the speech-acts of individuals. ‘Language exists only through articulated speech, grammar and lexicon are barely comparable to its dead skeleton’.68 Nicely summing up this Janus faced character, von Humboldt writes: ‘language creates itself . . . out of speech’.69

19.6  Language as the Conduit of Geist: the German Idealists The German Idealists were frustrated by Kant’s restriction of metaphysics to a second-order reflection on the preconditions of experience. According to Kant, the mind imposes a priori structures on the world we think about (‘appearances’), yet the content of our knowledge is a posteriori, and depends on the impact on our cognitive apparatus of ‘things as they are in themselves’, to which we have no access. Exploiting various tensions in this ‘transcendental idealism’, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel took idealism to extremes. The subject furnishes not just the form of cognition, but also its content. Reality is a

63 

‘Das vergleichende Sprachstudium’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 21. ‘Das vergleichende Sprachstudium’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, p. 27. 65  M. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 66  See ‘Grundzüge des allgemeinen Sprachtypus’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, p. 383, ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VI, p. 175. 67  ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, p. 46. 68  ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VI, p. 147. 69  ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VI, p. 180. 64 

384   Hans-Johann Glock manifestation of a spiritual principle which transcends individual minds, such as Hegel’s ‘absolute spirit’ (previously known as God). Since reality as it is in itself is entirely mental, it can be fully grasped by the mind. Philosophy once more turns into a super-science, as for traditional rationalism. It can gain insights into an ultimate reality and encompasses all other disciplines. All genuine knowledge is a priori, since reason can derive even apparently contingent facts, notably through the method of ‘dialectic’, which was rehabilitated in the face of Kant’s strictures. Fichte did not take a linguistic turn; reason rather than language remains central. But he applied his version of transcendental philosophy to the origins of language. He was convinced that one could ‘construct’ language through a ‘history of language a priori’. This enterprise purports to show that language was not just capable of coming into being, but ‘that and how it had to be invented’.70 It even seeks to demonstrate from non-empirical first principles that grammar must possess certain detailed features. The inference ticket is provided by the requirements of beings that are at once rational and embodied, and hence need to interact to become individuals.71 Schelling subscribed to a variant of lingualism, maintaining that ‘without language it is impossible to conceive not merely philosophical consciousness but consciousness in general’.72 He was exercised by the idea that language epitomizes the interplay between the individual and particular on the one hand and the general and universal on the other. Language turns into the ‘symbol of the identity of all things’, it is the ‘the ideal unity as the dissolution [Auflösung] of the particular in the universal, the concrete in the conceptual’. In this respect it resembles works of art; indeed, it is ‘the most perfect work of art’, the ‘eternal effect of the absolute act of cognition’ and hence comprehensible only by reference to ‘the whole of the universe’.73 In so far as sense can be made of these arcane pronouncements, it is that language enables at one and the same time the elevation of the ideas of something individual into something objective or intersubjective, and of something sensory into something conceptual. The common denominator appears to be that both the intersubjective and the conceptual are more general than their respective counterparts. Although Hegel’s reflections on language cannot outdo Fichte and Schelling as regards grandiose pretensions, they are more sustained. This holds in particular for the early period. For Hegel, absolute spirit comprises and explains everything, and history is nothing but the process of the self propelled development and realization of absolute spirit. Language is essential to this self-constitution. Like Hamann, Hegel exploits the ‘beautiful 70  J. G. Fichte, ‘Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache’, Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and H. Jacob, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964, I/3, pp. 91–127. 71  ‘Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache’, Gesamtausgabe, pp. 97–9. In his ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation’ (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. I, p. 10) Fichte also espoused a linguistic nationalism, opining that German is superior to Romance languages, since it is not based on a distinct parent-language. A ranking of different natural languages, though on syntactic rather than etymological grounds and with less nationalistic overtones, also features in Schelling and von Humboldt. 72  F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart: Cotta 1856–61, Vol. II/1, p. 52. 73  F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Philosophie der Kunst’, Werke, ed. M. Schröter, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1959, Vol. 3, pp. 378, 502–4.

Philosophy of Language    385 ambiguity’ of logos: ‘reason and at the same time language. For language is the pure existence of spirit; it is a thing, heard and turned back onto itself’.74 Hegel’s spirit is a personified version of logos. It requires language in order to achieve the self-awareness that is its telos. Naming things is the ‘primordial force’ of spirit. It is not just that consciousness without language remains ‘silent’. Because of its inevitable embodiment, consciousness is tied to language; it has ‘its being in language’.75 Furthermore, language ‘only exists as the language of a people, and so do understanding and reason’.76 Specific languages—Volkssprachen— are required, since they enable different flesh-and-blood humans to become aware of themselves as distinct subjects.77 These themes come to full fruition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The self-realization of spirit is among other things a process of self-objectification, or alienation, and hence requires language.78 Exploring a communitarian perspective on both subjectivity and language, Hegel insists that even absolute spirit is an instance of the kind of mutual recognition familiar from the famous master–slave dialectic, but one which requires language as its medium.79 He connects this idea not just to Pauline ideas from the New Testament, but also to the subject-predicate structure of sentences. In ordinary sentences, the two are connected yet remain separate. In ‘speculative’ sentences, by contrast, subject and predicate interpenetrate one another and become a genuine unity.80 Such passages are reminiscent of a rationalist identity theory à la Leibniz, according to which true propositions, at least those of a respectable, philosophical kind, simply unpack predicates that are already contained in the subject. Hegel also denies that one can have a clear concept of something without being able to cast it in words,81 and he promoted the use of German rather than Latin for philosophical purposes. Alas, he excelled at employing familiar vocabulary in unfamiliar and confusing ways, for the most part without clear explanations. The fact that he deliberately promoted ‘doing violence to language’ hardly provides an excuse for stretching syntax, morphology, lexicon, and the patience of his readers beyond breaking point.82 One intriguing though obscure chapter of the Phenomenology concerns ‘sensible certainty’. Its theme is that there is no such thing as purely empirical knowledge. Passive perception not only requires active conceptualization to produce human knowledge, as Kant had already maintained (‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’).83 Rather, the very idea of passive perception without the input of ‘active’ concepts is unstable. In this context Hegel discusses a potential counter-example, namely a form of consciousness that only employs indexicals like ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘I’. One idea 74  G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Vorlesung über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Dritter Teil, Erster Abschnitt’, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, Vol. 20, pp. 106–7. 75  G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Jenaer Systementwürfe I’, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Nordrheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Verbindung mit der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, Hamburg, 1968 ff., Vol. VI, p. 277, ‘Jenaer Systementwürfe III’, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. VIII, pp. 188–90. 76  ‘Jenaer Systementwürfe I’, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. VI, p. 226. 77  ‘Jenaer Systementwürfe I’, Gesammelte Werke, pp. 318–19. 78 Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. IX, pp. 275–76. 79  Gesammelte Werke, pp. 357–62. 80  Gesammelte Werke, p. 43. 81  Gesammelte Werke, p. 182. 82  For an opposing view, see Forster, German Philosophy of Language, pp. 160–3. 83  Critique of Pure Reason, B75, A51.

386   Hans-Johann Glock he might be driving at anticipates later insights by Wittgenstein, Strawson, and McDowell, namely that even such apparently ‘pure’ cases of ostension rely on concepts in order to achieve identifying reference to an object or property. In Hegel’s definitive statement of his system, the Encyclopedia,84 language occupies a less prominent and striking role, being confined to §§453-64.85 But lingualist claims remain. ‘It is in names that we think’.86 Language is not just as an elaboration or extension of ‘theoretical spirit’ (consciousness or intelligence), but essential to the latter. It connects the two cognitive functions held apart by Kant, intuition and thought, through the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft). In line with the anti-psychologism of Bolzano and Frege, Hegel points out that we can entertain thoughts even about concrete objects like a lion without any mental images crossing our mind. But he fails to note that the same goes for talking to oneself silently. At a methodological level, Hegel condemns analysing complex symbols in the way envisaged by Leibniz as counterproductive, not just because thought and language remain in flux, but also because it is through unanalysed names for complex things that language contributes to human understanding. Such passages also bring out an essential feature of Hegel’s lingualism. Spirit or logos may require language, yet only because language in turn reflects rational (and that means teleological and indeed divine) laws. It is not just a linguistic conception of reason, but a rationalist and ultimately theological conception of language. At the same time language in the abstract, the medium through which a Spinozist deity constitutes itself, must take on the form of specific languages, even for the purposes of science. Like the hermeneuticians, Hegel is a conceptual pluralist who allows for different conceptual schemes, notably under the title of distinct ‘formations (Gestalten)’ of consciousness or thought in the Phenomenology and in his review essay on von Humboldt.87 But he espouses a form of absolutism, albeit a dynamic one in which history plays a crucial role. All forms of consciousness are inherently unstable; they must undergo a dialectic transformation until they finally attain the only coherent standpoint, the apogee constituted by Hegel’s own philosophy.

19.7  The Logical Strand: Bolzano and Frege The logical strand engages with language in the context of the interaction between mathematics, formal logic, and philosophy. It continues Leibniz’s quest for a chacteristica universalis, a universal language of thought whose symbolic structure would reflect directly the structure of the world and/or our thought.88 Frege pioneered logicism, the project 84 

85 Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XX.   Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XX, pp. 446–63. 87  Werke, Vol. II, pp. 132–49 and pp. 189–203.   Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XX, p. 460, §462. 88  J. van Heijenoort, ‘Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language’, Synthese 17 (1967), pp. 324–30 drew an influential distinction between Leibniz’s idea of a characteristica universalis—a universal medium of thought—and his idea of a calculus ratiocinator, a tool for checking inferences and calculations. In response to Schröder’s misinterpretation of his logical system as a mere attempt to pursue logic in a more algorithmic manner, Frege insisted that he had constructed a calculus ratiocinator only because it is an indispensible component of a characteristica universalis (aka ‘lingua characteristica’) that renders explicit the structure of all rigorous scientific thought. For example, ‘Ueber den Zweck der Begriffsschrift’, repr. with original pagination Begriffsschrift und andere Aufsätze, Olms: Hildesheim, 1977, pp. 1–2, 97–8. 86

Philosophy of Language    387 of providing mathematics with secure foundations by deriving it from logic. In some respects, Bolzano straddles the divide between hermeneutics and logic. His hermeneutic reflections under the heading Auslegungskunde and Auslegungskunst latch on to a tradition that has been neglected by mainstream scholars of hermeneutics. Fortunately, it has recently been rediscoverd by analytic philosophers of language in the wake of Davidson.89 It runs from Leibniz through Meier and Baumgarten to Lambert. Its members use, among other labels, that of ‘logical hermeneutics’, which Bolzano also links to the idea of a ‘philosophical grammar’. Like that tradition, Bolzano regards hermeneutics as part of logic. Why? Because logic faces the task of identifying the logical constants, which presents the further challenge of understanding ‘cryptic’ or ‘exponible’ sentences.90 These stand in need of an Auslegung, ‘a sentence that states that the sense of certain signs is such-and-such’.91 In Bolzano’s hermeneutics, there is a close connection between interpretation, philosophical grammar, and logico-semantic analysis. He distinguishes between the ‘extended’ and the ‘non-genuine’ (uneigentlich) meaning of a word (e.g. calling ostriches birds vs. speaking of an ‘odd bird’). Regarding the latter, he separates life from dead metaphors. In the same context he anticipates the idea of degrees of understanding, and discusses Gricean implicatures under the heading of ‘tropical mode of speech’. A sentence which in its literal utterance may be false is supposed to be understood in a way that is as close as possible to that literal meaning, while nonetheless expressing something ‘reasonable and true’.92 This enterprise also comprises understanding the beliefs of others and their actions. The most general task of Auslegung or interpretation is understanding the goals (Zwecke) of others, which are supposed to comprise their concepts, needs, and so on. The procedure requires a presumption that ‘the more rational someone is, the less we can accept an interpretation which imputes certain gross errors on his part’. We always start with the assumption that the speaker wants to be understood. But contrary to current ideals of charity, all of this is subject to the degree of acquaintance that we have with him. Moreover, while understanding and communication rely on such default assumptions, these hold only ‘until proven otherwise’.93 Bolzano’s philosophical logic is characterized by an anti-subjectivist and anti-psychologistic semantic Platonism, which anticipates that of Frege. He distinguished between mental judgements, linguistic sentences, and propositions (Sätze an sich). A proposition like Pythagoras’ theorem can be expressed by sentences in different languages. It is not true or false in a language or a context, but true or false simpliciter, independently of whether anyone ever calls or judges it true. Unlike utterances or judgements, propositions are ‘non-actual’, that is, they stand outside the causal order of the spatio-temporal world. A proposition is the content of a judgement, and also the sense of the utterance that

89 

W. Künne, ‘Prinzipien der wohlwollenden Interpretation’, in Intentionalität und Verstehen, ed. Forum Philosophie Bad Homburg, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990; Scholz, O., Verstehen und Rationalität, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999. 90 Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre in vier Bänden [1837], 2nd edition Leipzig: Meiner, 1929, Vol. II: §169/ pp. 211–12, 91  Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, § 285/p. 68. In Vol. IV, §387, Auslegung is an activity. See S. Centrone and W. Künne, ‘Bolzanos Zeichentheorie’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 83, p. 183 n23. 92  Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, §285/pp. 67–71, 79. 93  Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, §§385–7/pp. 544–6; see Scholz, op.cit., p. 67.

388   Hans-Johann Glock expresses it. Similarly, we must distinguish the components of propositions—concepts or ‘representations-as-such’—from the linguistic components of sentences and the mental components of judgements. Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, §285 also features detailed reflections concerning signs and their meaning. No less a figure than Roman Jakobson praised them for ‘abounding with ideas’. Yet even admirers admit that Bolzano’s official doctrine is ‘forbiddingly complex’ and fails to square with some other passages.94 Abstracting from such complications, the following points stick out. Bolzano distinguishes mere Kennzeichen (what Peirce calls ‘indexes’) from ‘signs’ proper, which the speaker produces with the intention of conveying something. While a groan emitted mechanically is a mere Kennzeichen, a groan produced with the intention of catching the attention of a hearer is a sign. But it is a ‘natural’ sign, since it exploits connections that are known to all humans. By contrast, ‘coincidental’ signs exploit connections which are known only to some humans (a specific audience). Among coincidental signs, ‘arbitrary’ signs are those based on explicit conventions.95 A sign like ‘Socrates’ expresses a subjective representation of the speaker—a mental episode of thinking of Plato’s teacher; it causes a subjective representation in the hearer—a mental episode of perceiving the sign. The latter in turn arouses another mental episode which, in successful communication, is type-identical with the one expressed by the speaker. Both episodes ‘represent’ the object signified—Socrates. But the meaning of a sign is neither a subjective mental representation nor the material object referred to. It is an ‘objective representation’—an abstract object. Although Bolzano occasionally speaks of signs ‘expressing’ (ausdrücken) objective representations—that is, their meaning—he officially uses the term ‘signify’ (bezeichnen), which is close to ‘refer’. This is unfortunate, since signs in general do not refer to their meanings, but at most through having a meaning to something else. Another weakness arises from the conjunction of the following three claims: (a) all episodes of thinking are either acts of judging or of representing; (b) only acts of judging have a propositional content; (c) all signs signify or express objective representations. It follows (d) that the meaning of a sign is never a proposition, even in the case of indicative sentences, and (e) that one cannot entertain a proposition without judging it to be true.96 For all his far-sighted innovations, Bolzano’s formal logic was old-fashioned in its insistence that all propositions divide into subject and predicate. To pursue his logicist programme, Frege had to overcome the limitations of syllogistic logic. The basic idea of his Begriffsschrift (1879)97 is to extend the mathematical idea of a function from numbers to propositions. By contrast to school-grammar and Aristotelian logic, a proposition like 94 Künne, Essays on Bolzano, Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2008, pp. 174–5. 95 

Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, §285/pp. 67–9, 78. Both (d) and (e) were rejected by Frege and later by two pupils of Brentano, Husserl and Meinong. See Centrone and Künne, 2008, pp. 178–9. For their philosophies of language see, respectively, P. Simons, ‘Meaning and Language’, in B. Smith and D. Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 and J. Marek, ‘Alexius Meinong’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at . For that of another pupil of Brentano— Marty, see K. Mulligan (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. On debates about judgement and truth within the logical strand see M. Textor (ed.), Judgement and Truth in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 97  Reprinted in Begriffsschrift. 96 

Philosophy of Language    389

(1) Caesar conquered Gaul

is analysed not into a subject ‘Caesar’ and a predicate ‘conquered Gaul’, but into a function (or ‘concept’) and two arguments. (1) is the value of a two-place function x conquered y for the arguments Caesar and Gaul. In Frege’s mature system, concepts are functions that map objects onto a ‘truth-value’. Thus the value of the two-place concept x conquered y is either ‘the True’ (e.g. for the arguments Caesar and Gaul) or the False (e.g. for Bush and Iran), depending on whether the resulting proposition is true or false. Frege further extended the idea of a truth-function to propositional connectives and expressions of generality. Negation, for example, is a truth-function which maps a truth-value onto the converse truth-value: ‘p’ has the value True if and only if (from now on ‘iff’) ‘~p’ has the value False. Similarly (2) All electrons are negative is analysed not into a subject ‘all electrons’ and a predicate ‘are negative’, but into a one-place function-name ‘if x is an electron, then x is negative’ and a universal quantifier (‘For all x,...’) that binds the variable x. Existential propositions (‘Some electrons are negative’) are expressed through the universal quantifier plus negation (‘Not for all x, if x is an electron, then x is not negative’). This quantifier-variable notation is capable of formalizing propositions involving multiple generality. It is also capable of revealing the flaws in the ontological argument. Unlike omnipotence, existence is not a ‘component’ of the concept God, a feature which might be part of its definition. Rather, it is a ‘property’ of that concept, namely the property of having at least one object falling under it. ‘God exists’ does not attribute to God the property of existing, but to the concept of God the property of being instantiated (its logical form is ‘∃xGx’ rather than ‘Eg’).98 Frege was concerned only with the logical or conceptual ‘content’ of signs, which is relevant to the inferential relations in which sentences containing these signs stand, not with their ‘colouring’, the mental associations they evoke. In ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892) he distinguished two aspects of content: their meaning (Bedeutung), which is the object they refer to, and their sense (Sinn), the ‘mode of presentation’ of that referent. A sign refers to a thing through its sense; and that sense determines its meaning: one and the same meaning can be presented through different senses, but not vice versa.99 Frege applies this two-tier model of meaning to all types of expressions. The meaning of a proper name is what it stands for, its sense the properties which that bearer must possess. Concept-words express a sense and refer to a concept. The meaning of a sentence is its truth-value; the sense of a sentence is the ‘thought’ or proposition it expresses. Since ‘sense’ roughly equates to meaning in the ordinary understanding, this contradicts Bolzano’s (d). Frege also keeps apart the occurrence of a thought when it is not asserted—for example, the occurence of ‘p’ in ‘|― (p ⊃ q)’—from its occurrence on its own—‘|―p’—when it is.100 This so-called ‘Frege point’ is ignored not just by Bolzano’s (e), but also by the traditional

98 

Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), reprint Olms, Hildesheim, 1977, §53. Reprinted in Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, Vandenhoeck: Göttingen, 1980. References to original pagination given in all editions and translations. On colouring vs. sense see p. 31. 100  Begriffsschrift, §2 and p. 101; ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, p. 35. 99 

390   Hans-Johann Glock view that the assertive force attaches to the predicate, which is part of asserted and unasserted propositions alike. The sense/meaning distinction explains why an identity-statement like ‘The morning star is the evening star’ differs from the trivial ‘The morning star is the morning star’ in being informative. ‘The morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ have the same meaning—Venus—but different senses, since they present that object in different ways. It also explains how an expression like ‘the least rapidly convergent series’ fails to refer without being senseless. Any sentence in which such an expression occurs will have a sense— express a ‘thought’—but lack a meaning, that is, a truth-value. For the sense and the meaning of a sentence are a function of the senses and meanings respectively of its components. The sense of a name is the contribution it makes to the thought expressed by sentences in which it occurs. Moreover, that thought is given by the conditions under which it is true, an idea that marks the beginning of contemporary truth-conditional semantics.101

19.8  Anti-Psychologism and Lingualism His sense–meaning distinction notwithstanding, Frege’s semantics lapses into a referential conception in the following respects: (a) his employment of ‘meaning’ lends succour to a confusion of what, if anything, a sign stands for with its meaning; (b) by assigning a ‘meaning’ to every type of expression and calling all of them ‘names’ he ignores the fundamental difference between singular terms, which (purport to) stand for something, on the one hand, and concept-words or predicates and sentences on the other. Concept-words express rather than stand for concepts or properties, and sentences do not stand for anything, they say something. These failings were rectified by Wittgenstein. In one other respect, Wittgenstein followed Frege (and, unknowingly, Bolzano), namely anti-psychologism.102 Hamann and Herder were partly influenced by British empiricism and espoused a ‘quasi-empiricist’ principle that the meaning of an expression essentially depends on corresponding perceptual or affective sensations.103 Such a view stands in tension with the view that meaning is determined by use. Two subjects can follow different rules for the application of an expression, in spite of having the same perceptual input and the same mental associations. Conversely, they can employ a term according to the same rules, in spite of different perceptual inputs and mental associations. By disregarding colouring in favour of the inferential powers of expressions, Frege captures an aspect of use which is central to the literal meaning of expressions. Frege’s brilliant critique of Kant’s view that mathematics is based on pure intuitions and of Mill’s proposal that it depends on inductive generalizations also shows that logical and mathematical notions and propositions defy reduction to mental images or empirical evidence.104 Through his famous ‘context principle’, he also contributed to semantic holism. One must not ask for the meaning 101 

‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, pp. 25–8; Grundgesetze, §32. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: RKP, 1922, 3.14ff., 3.3 and 4.1121. 103 Forster, After Herder, p. 17. 104  Grundlagen, §§ 1–17. This tack was elaborated by Geach’s attack on ‘abstractionism’ (Mental Acts, London: RKP, 1971). 102 

Philosophy of Language    391 of a word in isolation, since words mean something only in the context of a proposition.105 The rationale for the methodological principle is mistaken: as long as a token of that type can be used in the context of sentences, a token word has a meaning even if it does not occur in the context of a proposition. But the important lesson is that the meaning of words is determined by how they can be used within propositions, irrespective of mental associations. More generally, Frege is right to keep apart ‘what is logical [or semantic] and hence objective, and what is psychological and hence subjective’.106 Whereas the ideas (Vorstellungen) individuals associate with a sign are subjective (psychological), its sense is objective. It is grasped by any individual who understands the sign, yet it exists independently of being grasped by any given individual. Thoughts, for instance, are mind-independent abstract entities in the following sense: they are true or false independently of someone grasping or believing them, and like the senses of words they can be shared and communicated between different individuals.107 Admittedly, Frege uses these truisms not just to combat psychologism, but also to erect a problematic three-world ontology (later revived by Popper). Thoughts are ‘non-actual’, that is, non-spatial, a-temporal and imperceptible, yet ‘objective’. They inhabit a ‘third realm’, a ‘domain’ beyond space and time which contrasts with the ‘first realm’ of private ideas (individual minds), and the ‘second realm’ of material objects, which are both objective and actual.108 But Wittgenstein and Ryle have reformulated the anti-psychologism in a lingualist rather than Platonist vein. The thought expressed by uttering a sentence differs from the sentence uttered and its utterance roughly in the way in which a move in chess differs from the material piece of a specific chess set and its being moved by an individual player. The difference lies not in the sentence being associated with mental occurrences or abstract entities, but in its being part of an intersubjective, rule-guided practice. Bolzano stressed that language structures, and thereby lends stability to, human thought. Yet he also recognized that fundamentally different subjects like God or animals can in principle have a mental life, and even entertain thoughts, without relying on language.109 Presumably under the influence of Leibniz, Frege went a step further in the direction of lingualism. He regarded language as indispensable not just to the expression and fixation of thoughts, but to thinking itself. Thoughts require a linguistic vehicle, but only for the anthropological reason that human beings cannot perceive thoughts without their linguistic clothing.110 Equally, he conceded that there is a rough correspondence between the structure of thought and that of language. But the task of logic is to analyse extra-linguistic thoughts, which embroils it in a ‘ceaseless struggle against . . . those parts of grammar which fail to give untrammeled expression’ to the logical structure of thought.111 Finally, 105  Grundlagen, p. XXII, §§60–2, p. 106. Cf. Glock, ‘Nonsense made Intelligible’, Erkenntnis, forthcoming. 106 Loc.cit. 107 See Grundlagen, §§26, pp. 84–5, 93; ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, pp. 29–30; Grundgesetze, pp. XII–XIX. 108  ‘Der Gedanke’, repr. with original pagination in Logische Untersuchungen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1976, pp. 66–75. 109  Wissenschaftslehre, Vol. III, §285/pp. 79–80. 110  ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Berechtigung einer Begriffsschrift’, repr. with original pagination in Begriffsschrift, pp. 48–50; trans. Bynum. 111  Posthumous Writings, trans. P. Long and R. White, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, pp. 6–7, see p. 142; ‘Die Verneinung’, in Logische Untersuchungen, p. 150.

392   Hans-Johann Glock although Frege showed considerable interest in natural languages, and occasionally relied on ordinary grammar for constructing his formal system, he conceived of the latter not as revealing the hidden logical structure of natural languages, but as providing an ideal language for the purposes of science, one which avoids ambiguity, vagueness, referential failure, and truth–value gaps.

19.9  The Critique of Language This strand shares with the logical strand the conviction that language is at the same time indispensable to human thought and a source of intellectual error and confusion. The inevitable moral is that proper attention to language is at least a propadeutic prerequisite of clear and sober thought. Accordingly, both strands give a linguistic twist to the Kantian idea that reason is both essential to human thought and a source of metaphysical illusions. But there are two important differences. Historically, whereas the logical strand follows the rationalism of Leibniz, the critique of language stands in the empiricist tradition of Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley. Methodologically, Frege and subsequent ‘ideal language philosophers’ sought the remedy for linguistic confusions in constructing a formal language that avoids the actual or perceived shortcomings of natural languages (referential failure, ambiguity, vagueness, category confusions) and replaces the latter, at least for the purposes of philosophy and science. By contrast, the critique of language sticks to the vernacular, while at the same time warning of the traps hidden within it. Sometimes this caution is inflated into a linguistic scepticism that denigrates language as an insurmountable obstacle to knowledge. The critique of language also inveighs against real or alleged misuses of specific expressions, and often these animadversions form part of a wider critique of cultural tendencies. Just as the hermeneutic strand of the nineteenth century builds on Hamann and Herder, the critique of language continues along lines drawn by the physicist G. Chr. Lichtenberg. His aphoristic Sudelbücher appeared posthumously in 1801 and impressed figures as diverse as Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kraus, Musil, and Wittgenstein. He may also have influenced Herder. As regards the futility of an ideal language, at any rate, both see eye to eye. ‘A completely philosophical language would have to be the speech of the Gods’. Since that is unattainable, one must use German (aka one’s mother tongue) as the instrument of philosophical reflection. One ought to ‘start out from the ordinary use of a word, try to develop, determine and explain its concept, and wherever necessary, to improve it through the assimilated philosophy of other languages’. In this context, Herder mentions Lichtenberg among others.112 Lichtenberg was hostile to the system building of academic philosophy. Genuine philosophy is a critical activity in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Instead of reaching firm conclusions, it forever questions assumptions through the ‘art of analysis’. ‘Our entire 112  ‘Begründung einer Ästhetik in der Auseinandersetzung mit Baumgarten’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, pp. 654–7, ‘Über die neuere deutsche Literatur, 1. Sammlung’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. I, p. 218; ‘Metakritik’, Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. VIII, p. 522n.; see also H. J. Cloeten, Language and Thought, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 32–3.

Philosophy of Language    393 philosophy is the correction of the use of language’.113 As regards the Cartesian cogito, he famously challenged the license to postulate a subject of thought like Descartes’ res cogitans. ‘We become aware of certain representations, which do not depend on us; others believe that we at least depend on ourselves; where is the boundary? We are acquainted only with the existence of our sensations, representations and thoughts. It thinks, one should say, as one says it thunders’.114 The language of science strives to be pure and exact— as in Frege’s ideal of the determinacy of sense that a Begriffsschrift has to fulfil. But given the dynamic nature of thought and speech, rigid definitions are more of a hindrance than a help. Ordinary language is often more intelligible and hence more propitious to philosophical clarity than artificial terminology or languages. ‘Philosophy, when it speaks, is always forced to talk the language of non-philosophy (Unphilosophie)’.115 The most paradigmatic though least famous proponent of an empiricist critique of language is O. F. Gruppe, who was influenced by Bacon, Lichtenberg, and Herder. He targets ‘[traditional] metaphysics and speculative philosophy [German idealism] in general’, since they seek to achieve ‘cognitions through mere concepts’.116 The root cause of their aberrations is the ‘infatuation’ with and ‘mystification’ through language, which seduces us and leads us astray.117 Metaphysical speculations like those of Hegel are not so much false or unfounded, but ‘sheer nonsense’.118 Expressions like ‘being’, ‘nothing’, and ‘becoming’ are misappropriated when Hegel uses them outside of their everyday context in a ‘metaphysical meaning’.119 More generally, the majority of philosophical questions ‘are of the kind one should never have meddled with, since they contain in themselves something misunderstood, distorted, false, indeed thoroughly nonsensical and thus . . . never permit hope for a reasonable solution’.120 All uses of language rely on tacit assumptions. The critique of language has to scrutinize the assumptions underlying philosophical questions in order to establish whether they are ‘meaningful at all’.121 It is striking to what extent Gruppe anticipated the metaphilosophical aims—though not the logico-semantic methods—of analytic philosophers like Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ryle.122 Nietzsche is a more ambivalent representative of the critical tradition. He came to philosophy through classical scholarship (Klassische Philologie), which explains his keen interest in language. Another crucial influence on his early philosophy of language was provided by the twofold impact of Schopenhauer and Wagner. In the early work leading up to Geburt der Tragödie he adopts a very uncritical stance. In line with broad expressivism, he includes art under the general rubric of language. Whereas language proper represents the Apollinian element of reason, music, in particular, represents the Dionysian element of instinct and emotion. Language is an ‘infinitely inadequate symbolism’. By contrast, music constitutes a kind of primordial language. It is capable not just of ‘an infinite clarification’, 113  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, ‘Sudelbücher’, Schriften und Briefe, ed. W. Promies, Munich: Hanser, 1994, Vol. II, pp. J 2148, H 146. 114 ‘Sudelbücher’, Schriften und Briefe, Vol. II, p. K 76. 115 ‘Sudelbücher’, Schriften und Briefe, Vol. I, p. H 151. 116  O. F. Gruppe, Wendepunkt der Philosophie im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin: G. Riemer, 1834, Vol. VII, pp. 296–381. 117  O. F. Gruppe, Antäus. Ein Briefwechsel über spekulative Philosophie in ihrem Konflikt mit Wissenschaft und Sprache, Berlin: Nauck, 1831, pp. 304, 285, 312. 118  Antäus, p. 291. 119  Antäus, pp. 285–87. 120  Wendepunkt, p. 410. 121  Antäus, pp. 21, 32. 122  See Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy?, chs. 2 and 6.

394   Hans-Johann Glock but of directly capturing Schopenhauer’s thing in itself—das ‘Ureine’.123 Language is but an ephemeral manifestation of a primordial force. Nietzsche occasionally refers to it as grammar or logic, but more felicitously as ‘instinct’. For this primordial force is ultimately a feature of human physiology, yet also the result of a teleology without designer, rather than a merely mechanical phenomenon. In this context Nietzsche even has a good word for his bogey Kant, whose Critique of Judgement allows that something may be ‘fit for purpose without a consciousness’. Language is ‘neither the conscious creation of individuals nor of a majority’, since all conscious thought presupposes language.124 A next step was to adopt an aesthetic perspective on language proper, according to which it is itself a kind of art. But this does not mitigate Nietzsche’s sceptical attitude, since the artistic spirit of language renders it unsuitable to the pursuit of objective timeless truths. Scientific and philosophical discourse aims at truth. But its conceptual apparatus is derived from prior artistic metaphors and aspirations. As a result, it is an illusion that ‘in language, we really have knowledge of the world’.125 The ‘conventions of language’ are not ‘adequate expression of all realities’; instead, they signify ‘relations of things to human beings’ and are ultimately nothing but ‘illusions and visions (Traumbilder)’.126 The artistic nature of language and the intuitive force behind concept formation manifests itself in our ‘instinct to form metaphors, the primordial instinct of humans’ which is then sublimated in mythology, science, and art. Nietzsche propagates not just recognizing this irrational foundation of language in metaphor, but giving it proper space in our lives.127 In Nietzsche’s last writings, these themes turn into central components of his wellknown ‘perspectivism’ (aka relativism). Scepticism about language fuels a general critique not just of metaphysics but also of traditional ethics. In both arenas language leads us astray because we forget the ethymology of central notions. Thus our general moral principles are based on ignoring that the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is geared only to its original purpose of keeping apart the consequences of specific actions; and our prejudice that the objects themselves possess secondary qualities ignores that terms like ‘hard’ and ‘green’ in their proper application signify effects rather than causes. ‘Words lie in our path’.128 A whole ‘mythology’ is laid down in our language,129 in that ‘seduction on the part of grammar’ misleads us into metaphysical illusions and gives succour to philosophical systems.130 Nietzsche tries to wean us off our ‘faith in grammar’, in particular in

123  See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 15 Vols., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980, Vol. I, p. 104, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1869 bis Ende 1874’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. VII, pp. 47–63, 159, 184. 124  ‘Vorlesungen über die lateinische Grammatik, Cap. 1 Vom Ursprung der Sprache’, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976ff., Vol. II/2, pp. 186– 187. See E. Behler, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’, in T. Borsche, Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996, pp. 297–99. 125  ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, p. 30, §11. 126  ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I, pp. 876–9. 127  ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I, pp. 883–9. 128 ‘Morgenröthe’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. III, p. 53, §47. 129  This claim anticipates and probably influenced Wittgenstein, even though the latter credited Paul Ernst (see Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, p. 280). 130  ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. II, pp. 546f., §11 and ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. V, pp. 29–54, §16–34.

Philosophy of Language    395 the distinction between subject and predicate, which tempts us to postulate divine agents for phenomena. Indeed, ‘reason’ is nothing other than the ‘metaphysics of language’ and ‘ “Reason” in language: oh what a deceitful wench! I fear, we shall not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar’.131 Although Nietzsche persists in at least alerting us to linguistic traps, he remains pessimistic. ‘Rational thought is an interpreting according to a schema which we cannot throw off’.132 And, sure enough, his own perspectivism is partly based on the kind of grammatical-cum-logical mistakes he sought to overcome. Thus starting out from the correct observation that word meaning is a matter of convention and that ‘as far as words are concerned, what matters is never truth’, he fallaciously infers that language cannot really express any truths.133 This conclusion is not just self-refuting, it ignores the difference between words, the meaning of which is indeed subject to conventions loosely understood, and the sentences we formulate on the basis of such conventions:  whether what these sentences say (given their literal meaning) is true or false does not depend on these conventions, but on how things are. Nietzsche’s attempts to base his own pseudo-scientific anthropology on the critique of language are even less prepossessing. Thus he speculates that the ‘the lure of certain grammatical functions is in their final foundation the lure of physiological value-judgements and race-conditions’.134 Fritz Mauthner recognized the potential of Nietzsche’s work for basing a critique of traditional ethics and metaphysics on reflections on the scope and limits of linguistic expressions, in particular the dangers of reification and unrecognized metaphors. But he also recognized that Nietzsche’s own amoralism evinced a novel variant of ‘linguistic superstition’. Nietzsche’s ‘distrust of language is unlimited; but only as long as it is not his language’.135 The label Sprachkritik came to prominence through Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache.136 Mauthner’s work was part of the so-called ‘crisis of language’, a general concern with the authenticity of symbolic expression in philosophy, science, art and public life at the end of the nineteenth century.137 Mauthner pursued a Kantian goal, the defeat of metaphysical speculation. But he surplanted the critique of reason with a critique of language, and his work owed more to Hume and Mach. His method is psychologistic and historicist: his critique of language is ultimately part of social psychology. The content is empiricist, indeed sensualist—the foundations of language are sensations—and the result sceptical. Reason is identical with language, yet the latter is unsuited for penetrating

131 ‘Götzen-Dämmerung’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. VI, pp. 77–8.

132  ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente Sommer 1886 bis Herbst 1887, 5, 22’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XII, pp. 193–4. 133  ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I, pp. 873–90. See S. Schroeder, Wittgenstein, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, p. 54. 134  ‘ Jenseits von Gut und Böse’, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. V, p. 35, §20. 135  Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Leipzig: Meiner, 1923, Vol. I, in Das Philosophische Werk, Vienna: Böhlau, 1999, Vol. I, pp. 364–72. 136  See entry ‘Sprachkritik’ in his Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Leipzig: Meiner 1923–4, Vol. 3. 137  Another expression of this crisis was Karl Kraus, the formidable cultural critic of the late Habsburg Empire. His masterful polemical analysis of language influenced Wittgenstein’s critique of language. Opponents are literally taken at their word. Their style, sometimes even a single ill-judged sentence, is taken to reveal both their fallacies and their character-failings. See A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973, ch. 3.

396   Hans-Johann Glock reality. Mauthner combines an extreme linguistic scepticism with the view that there are profound insights that defy being expressed in language. His ineffable truths, however, are not confined to art; instead, they culminate in a more general and ‘wordless mysticism’ with a religious trajectory.138 Mauthner recognizes that his linguistic diatribes against the idea that language is suited for expressing any kind of insight eventually result in a selfannihilation or ‘suicide’ of language that also engulfs any critique of language. Following the trajectory of Nietzsche rather than Lichtenberg or Gruppe, he pursues the critique of language to its limits and beyond.139

19.10  Instead of a Conclusion The hermeneutic strand continued into the twentieth century, when philosophical hermeneutics was transformed into the hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer. It also influenced Francophone structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. And through von Humboldt it marks the foundation of contemporary linguistics—both synchronic and diachronic. The hermeneutic strand is engaging, illuminating, and occasionally path-breaking. It deserves credit, in particular, for recognizing language as an intersubjective, historically developing practice. It is also to be praised for addressing philosophical problems concerning not just language in general but specific languages. At the same time it runs the risk of reifying both language and natural languages (Volkssprache) as super-individual subjects. Furthermore, it is perennially prone to potentially selfrefuting forms of irrationalism and relativism. Finally, it often combines philosophy of language not just with philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, anthropology, and linguistics, but also with religious views. And these are none the better for being thickly disguised by assorted mixtures of Spinozist metaphysics, misappropriated Kantian terminology, and bad writing, as in Hamann and the German Idealists. As regards prose, the critique of language has the edge. And its cultural criticism has more to offer than most contemporary contributions to that genre. Both its quest for clarity and its critique of metaphysics would have profited, however, from closer attention to the different functions of distinct parts of speech. By paying such attention, the logical strand was able to develop more fruitful logical, semantic, and pragmatic categories. The quest for an ideal language is problematic, not least because natural language must remain the ultimate medium of explanation and clarification. But it had a profound and partly beneficial impact on the linguistic turn of the analytic tradition. Frege, together with Russell, pioneered logical analysis. They not only invented a powerful logical system, but also demonstrated its use in tackling philosophical problems, notably concerning existence. It is this twofold inspiration that gave real teeth to the project of analysing language which drove 138 

For example, Beiträge, Vol. III, pp. 616–20. Tractatus 6.54 inherited the image of throwing away the ladder once one has climbed up on it from Schopenhauer and/or Mauthner (Glock, Wittgenstein Dictionary, p. 335). But its position is more sophisticated, if not, in the final reckoning, coherent. Considering also the pronounced difference in method, Wittgenstein is right to distance himself from Mauthner (pace Cloeren, Language and Thought, ch. 17). ‘All philosophy is “critique of language”. (However, not in Mauthner’s sense)’ (4.0031). 139 

Philosophy of Language    397 the non-psychologistic critique of language in Wittgenstein and the logical empiricists. In due course, Wittgenstein and so-called ordinary language philosophy also rediscovered central lessons of the hermeneutic tradition—independently, and with greater semantic sophistication and dialectical acuity. Last but not least, the philosophical prose and the style of argument of Bolzano and Frege provide a striking model of how complex problems can be discussed in a way which is clear, profound, and honest. In all these respects, the logical strand marks the beginning of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.140

Selected Bibliography Apel, K. O., Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus. Bonn: Bouvier, 1963. Berlin, I., Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976. Cloeren, H. J., Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytic Philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988. Forster, M. N., After Herder. Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Forster, M.  N., German Philosophy of Language. From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gipper, H. and Schmitter, P., Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1985. Glock, H. J., What is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lifschitz, A., Language and Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Janik, A. and Toulmin, S., Wittgensteins Vienna. New York: A Touchstone Book, 1973. Klassiker der Sprachphilosophie. Von Platon bis Noam Chomsky, ed. T. Borsche. München: C. H. Beck, 1996. Philosophie als Sprachkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Textauswahl I, ed. H. Cloeren. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1971. Philosophie als Sprachkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Textauwahl II, ed. S. J. Schmidt. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1971.

140 

See Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy, chs. 2, 3, 6, and 9. For comments and help I should like to thank Michael Forster, Peter Hacker, Meret Hauser-Polzer, Susanne Richli, and the participants of the 2013 Mind, Language, World conference at the University of Kent, UK.

Chapter 20

N i n eteen th- Cen tu ry Ger m a n L ogic Graham Priest Logic, by the way, has not gained much in content since Aristotle’s times and indeed it cannot, due to its nature . . . In present times there has been no famous logician, and we do not need any new inventions in logic, because it contains merely the form of thinking. Immanuel Kant. From the introduction to his lectures on logic. (Hartman and Schwarz, 1974: 24–5)

20.1 Introduction Let me start by saying how, for the purpose of this chapter, I have chosen to interpret the words of its title: none is innocent. Let us work backwards.1 ‘Logic’ is used in many ways, and in different ways even by some of the thinkers we will meet. In a chapter of this length it would be impossible to take on board all these usages. I have chosen to interpret the word in the way that contemporary logicians understand it. That is, logic concerns what follows from what: which premises entail which conclusions, and why. Of course, this cannot be divorced from other important questions, such as: what 1  There are some other preliminary remarks that need to be made. In a survey of this kind it is impossible to do justice to the richness and intricacies of the thought of any one of the writers we will meet, let alone all of them. For the same reason, there are people who would have to be mentioned in a longer treatise, but for whom there is no space in this. I have had to select what seem to me to be the most significant people, and the most significant features of their work. This introduces an ineliminable subjectivity into the chapter. A second source of subjectivity is the fact that history is not simply a catalogue of names and dates. It is a narrative which makes the names and dates meaningful. I would not wish to pretend that what I am doing here is anything other than telling a story about the history of logic as one contemporary logician sees it—though for the most part, I do not think there is anything particularly idiosyncratic about it. At the end of each main section of this chapter I will give references to places where the material covered in that section is discussed by others in greater detail.

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    399 sorts of things, exactly, are premises and conclusions? What sorts of things constitute them? And how do some of these things which are particularly important in the context of logic, such as negation, work. Secondly, ‘German’. Defining ‘German’ in terms of the geographical boundaries of modern Germany makes little intellectual sense. What is arguably the modern state of Germany did not, itself, come into existence until 1871. And there were significant thinkers who are clearly in the relevant intellectual community, but who lived outside its contemporary boundaries. (Kant was in Königsberg, which is modern day Kaliningrad, in Russia; Bolzano was in Prague, in the modern Czech Republic.) It seems best, to me, to characterize the intellectual community we are dealing with by its common tongue. So I will take Germans to be people who were native German speakers. ‘The nineteenth century’ might seem the least problematic of the words; but, in fact, it is the most problematic. It is silly to suppose that, intellectually, it came into existence at midnight of 1 January 1801. The nineteenth century started before that; and the eighteenth century ended after that. In exactly the same way, it is absurd to suppose that the nineteenth century ended at exactly 1 January 1901, and that the twentieth century started then. So how best may one understand ‘the nineteenth century’ in this context? To answer this question one needs to situate the century in the history of the development of logic.

20.2  The History of Western Logic Broadly speaking, the history of Western logic falls into three major phases of growth, interspersed by two periods of stasis, and even decline. (The study of logic in the East has its own story to tell.) The first phase of growth was in Ancient Greece. Aristotle developed the theory of the syllogism, and the Stoic logicians developed a somewhat different theory of logical consequence: a version of what we would now call propositional logic. With the decline of the Western part of the Roman Empire, the study of logic goes into decline in Christendom. Logic is still studied in the Islamic tradition, but mainly by way of writing commentaries, especially on Aristotle, rather than by the development of radically new ideas. The second major growth phase of logic in the West was in the great medieval universities, such as Oxford and Paris. The high period of this was the development of the logica nova (new logic, term logic) in the fourteenth century. The medieval logicians developed the Aristotelian theory of the syllogism, blended it with Stoic propositional logic, and developed many novel theories of, amongst other things, consequentiae, suppositiones, obligationes, insolubiles (as a first cut:  logical consequence, truth conditions, rules of debate, logical paradoxes). With the rise of Humanism, much of this sophistication fell into oblivion under the general attack on Scholasticism. (In fact, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the depth of medieval logic was rediscovered.) There is then a somewhat dull period in logic until the commencement of the third great period of growth, the main bright spot being Leibniz, whose attempt to articulate a characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator (a sort of proto-formal language, with rules for calculating in it) arguably provided a premature anticipation of later developments.

400   Graham Priest The third great period of the development of logic commences in the second half of the nineteenth century, and continues through today (with no sign of coming to an end). This period was inaugurated by logicians applying mathematical techniques to logic—such as those of axiomatization, model theory, abstract algebra—as well as the heightened standards of mathematical rigour being developed in the contemporary mathematics. In the twentieth century, this has produced metamathematics, the foundations of computational theory, the panoply of non-classical logics, and all the standard fare of the contemporary logic curriculum. Now, the period which is our special concern in this chapter, the nineteenth century, is the site of the rupture into this third great period. It starts with the rump of logic that was left after the decline of medieval logic, and ends with the creation of mathematical logic. German logicians are not the only significant players in this period. However, Germany certainly produced some of the most significant. Against this background, let us now turn to details.2

20.3  Kant and Logic Let us start with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).3 Logic was singularly important for Kant. It provided the tectonic framework for the first of his three great Critiques, Critique of Pure Reason.4 However, Kant is not a significant figure in the history of logic. Indeed, his reading of logic was singularly wrong-headed. He took it, not only that there had been no significant developments since Aristotle, but that there could not be. (See the quotation that opens this chapter.) He did, however, lecture on logic; and some of his lecture notes were subsequently edited and published by Gottlob Jäsche in 1800.5 The notes paint a fairly clear picture of the logic of his day (which I will call, henceforth, traditional logic). The main part of this comprises the Doctrine of Elements. There is also a short second part called the Doctrine of Method, which contains a few miscellaneous remarks, mainly about definition. The Doctrine of Elements has three parts: Concepts, Judgments, and Inferences. Inferences contains a 2  It is hard to find a good book that covers the whole history of logic. Between them, Kneale and Kneale (1962) and Haaparanta (2009) give quite good coverage. The encyclopedic Gabbay and Woods (2004–12) contains detailed essays on most aspects of the history of logic. Lenzen (2004) can be consulted for an account of Leibniz’ views on logic. 3  When I reference books or articles that appeared in German, I shall give their original publication details, and then an accessible English translation if and where one exists. When dealing with symbolism, I have decided to write in the notation of modern logic. This is not because the notations actually used are without historical interest. And there is also a certain danger in this. One should not take it for granted that the writers we will meet meant by their symbols exactly what the modern logician means by theirs. However, the use of modern symbolism makes it easier to tell a uniform story, and one that is more intelligible for non-specialists. (Not to mention one that makes typesetting easier!) It should go without saying that, for someone who wants a detailed understanding of thinkers, their ideas, and their symbolism, there is no substitute for reading the primary texts. 4  Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartnoch. 1st ed. 1781; 2nd ed. 1786. There are several accessible translations. Kemp Smith (1923) is an old standard; Guyer and Wood (1998) is a good more recent translation. 5  Immanuel Kants Logik, ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen, Königsberg: F. Nicolovius. English translation, Hartman and Schwarz (1974).

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    401 discussion of what inferences are valid. Judgments contains a discussion of the parts of inferences, the statements that make up the premises and conclusions; Concepts contains a discussion of the parts of judgments, namely, concepts. The most striking thing about what Kant has to say about concepts, from a contemporary perspective, is that they are clearly mental, psychological notions. In Judgments, we find, likewise, that judgments, being composed of concepts are psychological acts: they are propositions endorsed as true. (A modern logician is likely to point out that in an inference the premises do not have to be endorsed as true: logic itself need have no concern with the truth or otherwise of the premises.) According to Kant every judgment has a quality, quantity, relation, and modality. There are three possibilities in each case, which we may tabulate as follows (where the glosses are those of a modern logician, not Kant):

Quantity Singular Particular Universal

The subject of the sentence is a noun phrase The subject of the sentence is of the form ‘some As’ The subject of the sentence is of the form ‘all As’

Quality Affirmative The predicate of the sentence is ‘is (are) B(s)’ Negative The predicate of the sentence is ‘is (are) not B(s)’ Infinitive The predicate of the sentence is ‘is (are) non-B(s)’

Relation Categorical The sentence contains no propositional connective Hypothetical The sentence is of the form ‘if A then B’ Disjunctive The sentence is of the form ‘A (exclusively) or B’

Modality Problematic The sentence is stated as possibly true Assertoric The sentence is stated as actually true Apodictic The sentence is stated as necessarily true Oddly, Kant does not observe that only categorical judgments can have a quality or quantity, as such. Kant’s treatment of modality is also worth noting. Unlike the other categories, which are purely syntactic, modality concerns the attitude one has when one judges a sentence: whether one takes the content to be possible, actual, or necessary. Hence, nothing like modal logic in the contemporary, medieval (or even Aristotelian) sense is possible. In such logics, the modal operator is taken to be part of the content of the sentence, not one concerning the attitude of the person who judges. In Inferences, we find a fairly standard account of Aristotelian syllogistic, that is, inferences of the form: All/some/no S is/are M All/some/no M is/are P All/some/no S is/are P

402   Graham Priest —though it is worth noting that this includes syllogisms of the fourth figure (where the middle term, M, occurs as the predicate of the major premise, and the subject of the minor premise). This is not to be found in Aristotle, but is a medieval creation. Kant also claims that the conclusion of any syllogism has apodictic modality (i.e. holds of necessity). This seems to confuse the necessity of the conclusion with the necessity of the connection between premises and conclusion. After the discussion of the Aristotelian syllogism, we find the simple cataloguing of a few valid propositional inferences, such as modus ponens (A, if A then B; so B) and the disjunctive syllogism (A or B, it is not the case that A; so B). The section ends, interestingly, with some comments on inductive inference. That topic hardly features in medieval discussions of logic, which concerns itself mainly with deductive inference. By Kant’s time, an awareness of the importance of non-deductive inference has been brought to logic by the ‘scientific revolution’, and its novel conception of scientific methodology.6

20.4  Hegel and Dialectic Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) took over much of Kant’s thought, but changed it in very important ways. Notably, he added a dynamic element that was entirely absent in Kant. From the simplest and most elementary concept, that of being, a sequence of concepts develops in a zig-zag fashion until we reach the concept which is most adequate for characterizing reality, the absolute idea. The concepts are no mere abstracta, however. They are embodied in human and natural history. The conceptual development is therefore embodied in the historical development of the world. Hegel describes the evolution of concepts in his Science of Logic.7 The matter is covered again more briefly in Part 1 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.8 This is often referred to as the Lesser Logic, as opposed to the Logic (Science of Logic), and is often easier to understand than the Logic—in part because of the Zusätze, culled from Hegel’s lectures, and added by Leopold von Henning. The part of the Logics which is our major concern here is where Hegel discusses what I am calling logic: the theory of inference. This occurs in Sec. 1, Vol. 2 of the Logic, where the first three chapters are: the Concept, the Judgment, and the Syllogism. Hegel structures the general development of concepts as a sequence of triples—or better, triples of triples. Interestingly, the major exception to this is the chapter on Judgment, which is a quartet of triples, one member of the quartet dealing with each of Kant’s quality, quantity, relation, and modality.9 6 

For further discussion, see Tyles (2004) and Young (1992). Wissenshaft der Logik, Nürnberg: Schrag. Vol. 1, Pt. 1, 1812; Vol. 1, Pt. 2, 1813; Vol. 2, 1816. Translation, Miller (1969). 8  Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Heidelberg: Oßwald. 1st ed., 1817; 2nd ed., 1827; 3rd ed., 1830. Translated as Wallace (1873). 9  It is clear to readers of Hegel that he often struggles to fit material into his procrustean structure. It would appear that, in this case, he just gave up! 7 

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    403 In these three chapters, Hegel covers much the same ground as Kant covers in his lectures on logic. There are few technical novelties. Where the material mainly differs from Kant, is in that Hegel dresses up the material in terms of the general story of conceptual dynamics he wishes to tell. The material in question falls under the topic of what Hegel calls Subjective Logic (‘subjective’ because it deals with individual subjects’ reason). He contrasts this with what he calls Objective Logic, which is the dynamical evolution of the concepts. This (according to Hegel) has a certain pattern. Reflection on a concept produces an opposite concept. Thus, the first concept, being, delivers the concept nothing. These two then deliver a concept which is said to aufhebt the pair. This is a term that is virtually impossible to translate into English, since it can mean both to preserve and to get rid of. And Hegel means both of these things at once. The third term in the triad resolves the tension between the first two, so to say, by accepting it. Thus, being and nothing are aufgehoben by becoming. Things in a state of change both are and are not. At any rate, the new term produces its own opposite, and so the cycle starts anew. Now, this process has absolutely nothing to do with inference, and so with the sense of logic in this chapter. However, it is worth noting that when Hegel’s thought was taken up in the Marxist tradition, this sort of development did come to be thought of as delivering a way of reasoning: dialectical logic. Thus, in Anti-Dühring and Dialektik der Natur10 Friedrich Engels (1820–95) argues that formal (Aristotelian) logic is alright as far as it goes; but to reason properly about things in their dynamics, one requires dialectical logic. He even suggested some laws of dialectical logic, such as the mutual penetration of opposites (things produce their opposites) and the negation of the negation (when the opposite of the opposite arises, it is at a ‘higher level’ than the original). These were never developed into anything like a logic in a sense that a contemporary logician would recognize, however. Part of the problem was that, even to start to do this, one has to allow for the possibility of contradictory situations. Now, the Principle of Non-Contradiction, which says that such things are impossible, has been high orthodoxy since Aristotle defended the view in Metaphysics Γ. For Aristotle, the Principle was one of metaphysics, not of logic, but it blocks the way of any attempt to reason about situations that are genuinely contradictory. Unsurprisingly, in virtue of his views about conceptual development, Hegel criticizes and rejects the Principle in the Logic (Vol. 1, Bk. 2, Sect. 1): something can be both P and not-P. He was, in fact one of the few (and certainly the most significant) thinkers post-Aristotle and before the present day, to challenge the Principle. One significant feature of contemporary logic is the development of paraconsistent logics. These are logics which, in a certain sense, do not accept the Principle of Non-Contradiction, and which allow for contradictory states of affairs in a non-trivial fashion.11 Such logics are hardly dialectical logics. They have nothing, as such, to do with zig-zag dialectical developments. However, one might certainly attempt to use the techniques of paraconsistent logic to 10 

Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, Leipzig, 1878. Translated as Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947. Notes for the Dialektik were compiled between about 1873 and 1883, but never completed. They were published posthumously (with a Russian translation), Moscow, 1935. This was translated into English as Dialectics of Nature, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954. 11  See Priest and Tanaka (2009).

404   Graham Priest produce something that is recognizably a dialectical logic—though how one might best do this is moot.12

20.5  No Man’s Land In the decades that followed Hegel’s death, German philosophy was in something of a state of turmoil: the influence of Hegel waned, or morphed into the materialism of Feuerbach and Marx; under the influence of science, empiricism and naturalism became highly significant, perhaps threatening make philosophy obsolete; this, in turn, prompted a resurgence of Kantianism. Somewhere in this turmoil was the Logische Frage (Question of Logic). The question was, roughly, what to make of logic in a post-Hegelian environment. The question was put on the table by the person who coined the term in his essay of 1842, ‘On the History of Hegel’s Logic and Dialectical Method. The Logical Question in Hegel’s System’,13 Friedrich Adolph Trendelenberg (1802–72), who followed Hegel in Berlin. In his Logical Investigations14 he argued that Hegel had been right to criticize formal logic for being useless. Logic must always concern itself with content as well as form (a view which, strangely enough, he claimed to find in Aristotle). However, Hegel’s pan-logical metaphysics could not provide what is required in this regard. How, then, to turn this trick? Trendelenberg looked to Leibniz for an answer. (His essay of 1857, ‘On Leibniz’ Outline of a general Characteristic’15 may, in fact, be credited with bringing Leibniz back into the purview of German philosophers.) Though he was critical of many of the details of Leibniz’ characteristica universalis, he argued that what is required for the job at hand is a language which can express our concepts with a precision that natural languages do not do, a Begriffsschrift (concept script). Language was also important for another of Hegel’s critics, Otto Friedrich Gruppe (1804– 76), though for him it was natural language that was important. Gruppe rejected all a priori philosophy entirely; science had shown that naturalism was the path to progress. This did not mean that logic had to be given up, but it had to be approached in a novel way, via how people use natural language. In his Turning Point of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century,16 Gruppe argued as follows. Traditionally, logicians had taken concepts to be foundational, and judgments to be made up thereof. However, this gets things the wrong way around: it is judgments that are primary; concepts are abstracted from these. And what is one to make of the inferences which comprise judgments? An answer to that was given by another naturalist, Heinrich Czolbe (1819–73). In his New Account of Sensualism 17 Czolbe argued that inference (like other facets of language use) were simply matters of empirical psychology—and in the last instance, the laws of physiology. 12 

On Hegel’s logic, see Burbidge (2004). For some steps towards dialectical logic, see Priest (1982 and 1990). 13  ‘Zur Geschichte von Hegels Logik and dialektischer Methode. Die logische Frage in Hegels Systeme’, Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 1, 97: 405–8, 98: 409–12, 99: 413–14. 14  Logische Untersuchungen, Berlin: Bethge. 1st ed., 1840; 2nd ed., 1862; 3rd ed., 1870. 15  ‘Über Leibnizens Entwurf einer allgemeinen Charakteristik’, Philosophische Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Aus dem Jahr 1856: 36–69. 16  Wendepunkt der Philosophie im neunzehten Jahrhundert, Berlin: Reimer, 1834. 17  Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus, Leipzig, 1855.

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    405 The philosophical naturalism of writers such as Gruppe and Czolbe generated a reaction, a resurgence of Kantianism. The most important of the Neo-Kantians, and arguably the most influential of the writers on logic in these interregnum years, was Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–81). In his two books called Logic18 Lotze defended Aristotelian logic on a priori grounds. However, he insisted on the distinction between psychological acts of thought, and their objective contents.19 Logic concerns the latter.20

20.6  Bolzano, a Lone Voice None of these post-Hegelian developments produced any really novel developments in logic itself, though they certainty created an atmosphere of uncertainty in which new ideas could flourish. And flourish they did. In fact, even in the earlier part of the century such ideas were developing. Perhaps the most important person in the early such development was Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848). Bolzano was a remarkable person. Working almost entirely in isolation, he developed notably new ideas in logic, mathematics, and philosophy. As far as logic goes, his most significant publication was his Theory of Science.21 As the title of the book indicates, Bolzano was interested in knowledge quite generally, its constitution, ground, and structure. But logic plays the core role in this. Knowledge is expressed in propositions. But these are not subjective judgments. Rather, propositions are, essentially, the sorts of things that can be the objective contents of declarative statements. And a proposition is true or false, also objectively, depending on whether the world is as it says it to be. Thus, both propositions and their truth depend in no way on actual thinkers, though thinkers may understand them and grasp their truth. Propositions are made up of ideas. But the ideas are just as objective as propositions. In particular, they are nothing to do with particular thinkers—so concept might be a better word for what is intended here. Concepts are the sort of things that apply to the objects in their extensions. (So city applies to New York, Melbourne, Berlin, and so on.) We are still working, note, within an Aristotelian framework, so that, for example, Aristotle the Stagyrite is a concept that applies to just one object. Using the notion of extension, Bolzano characterized a number of important logical relations between concepts. For example: • A is compatible with B just if there are objects which are in the extension of both A and B. • A is included in B iff A and B are compatible, and the extension of A is contained in the extension of B. 18 

Logik, Leipzig, 1843 and 1874. He also anticipates two more Fregean themes, if somewhat inconsistently. One is the priority of the judgment over the concept; the other is the similarity between conceptual application and functional application in mathematics. 20  Further discussion of the matters in this section can be found in Peckhaus (2009) and Sluga (1980), chs. 1 and 2. 21  Wissenschaftslehre, Sulzbach: Seidel, 1837. Translated as George (1972). 19 

406   Graham Priest It is worth noting that one might expect a modal element to be present in some of these relations. Thus, one might expect: A is compatible with B if it is possible that there are objects which are. . . . Such an element is, however, absent in Bolzano. Arguably, Bolzano’s most novel contribution to logic was his definition of logical consequence. First, given any proposition, P, fix  on some of the concepts which occur in it,  a = a1 ,…, an . Call these parameters. Let b = b1 ,…, bn be a corresponding string of concepts, where each biis of the same kind as the corresponding parameter ai . We can form the proposition Pa (b) which is obtained by replacing each parameter, ai ,in P with the cor responding bi. Relative to a bunch of parameters, a, we can now mirror the logical relations between concepts with relations between propositions. Thus:    • P is compatible with Q just if there is a b such that Pa (b) and Qa (b) are both true.  • Q is deducible from P iff P and Q are compatible, and for every b such that Pa (b) is  true, Qa (b) is true. It is to be noted that deducibility holds with respect to a bunch of parameters (so that ‘Fred is red’ is deducible from ‘Fred is coloured’ with respect to the parameter Fred, since if b is any concept referring to a physical object, if it is true that b is red, then it is true that b is coloured). Bolzano does appear to accept the distinction between what would now be called logical constants (like if and not) and non-(logical constants) (like Fred and red)—or to give them their medieval names syncategorematic terms and categorematic terms—though he offers no principled account of the distinction. But given this distinction, he can frame an absolute notion of consequence, namely deducibility where the parameters are the non(logical constants). Note also that for Q to be deducible from P, P and Q must be compatible. Now, with respect to the parameters which are the non-(logical constants), P is not compatible with ‘it is not the case that P’. A fortiori, no Q is compatible with ‘P and it is not the case that P’. Hence, according to this conception of consequence, contradictions do not entail everything; in fact they entail nothing. The account of consequence was therefore paraconsistent. In fact, though there is probably no way he could have known this, Bolzano was reinventing the connexive notion of logical consequence endorsed by medieval logicians such as Abelard.22 This account is quite different from contemporary explosive logics, according to which a contradiction entails everything, and even from most contemporary paraconsistent logics, according to which contradictions entail some things but not others. A pleasing feature of Bolzano’s notion of logical consequence is that it allowed him to  extend his account of consequence to a non-inductive one. Fix the parameters, a, and assume that the possible replacements for each parameter are finite in number. We can define the conditional  probability of Q given P, Pr(Q/P), as the number of true things of the form (P ∧ Q) a (b) divided by the total number of true things of the form Pa (b). Given Bolzano’s account, if Q is a consequence of P, then Pr(Q/P) = 1. (And this can hold in general only because P and Q are compatible. In particular, then, substituting for some parameters makes P true. Hence, the divisor is non-zero.) But the value Pr(Q/P) can, in principle,

22 

See Priest (1999).

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    407 be any rational number between 0 and 1. So a proposition P may offer some lesser degree of support (or unsupport) for another. Because of his isolation, Bolzano’s work had very little immediate effect on the developments in logic. It first appears to have been noticed late in the century by Franz Brentano and his school. When Brentano’s student Kazimierz Twardowski founded what was to become the Lvov-Warsaw school, this knowledge moved there, though developments made by logicians such as Alfred Tarski (né Teitelbaum) were already overtaking it. That story belongs to the history of the twentieth century, however.23

20.7  Schröder and the Algebra of Logic When one reads Bolzano, it is striking that, though the ideas he is expressing are quite complex, beyond the occasional use of letters for quantities, he makes no use of mathematical symbolism. Matters are quite different with the next two people in our story, Schröder and Frege. Both were professional mathematicians; both used mathematical symbolism freely. The branch of mathematics called abstract algebra started to blossom towards the end of the eighteenth century, and developed throughout the nineteenth. Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) worked squarely in this tradition. In abstract algebras, we are concerned with a bunch of objects and operations on them. Thus, if a, b, and c are objects of our concern, and + and × are binary operations on the objects, we may form objects such as (a + b)c and ac + bc.24 Relationships between objects are typically expressed by equations, such as (a + b)c = ac + bc, and the algebra seeks to determine which relationships of this kind obtain, via a manipulation of these equations (of a kind now familiar from high school algebra). It is characteristic of an algebra, note, that the objects of the algebra can be thought of as different kinds of things. In other words, the algebra may have more than one natural interpretation. (In the language of modern logic, the algebras are not intended to be categorical.) The point, indeed, is to chart the commonalities of structure between different domains. Schröder framed the project early in his life of developing an algebra that charted the commonalities of structure between all mathematical quantities, very generally understood—a universal algebra—and applying it to various areas of mathematics and physics. He then came under the influence of two brothers with similar sympathies, Herman Günther Graßman (1809–77) and Robert Graßman (1815–1901). Soon after this, he discovered the work of the English logician and algebraist George Boole (1779–1848), and a little later, that of the polymath from the United States of America, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), both of whom made significant contribution to the algebraicization of logic. Schröder’s first main foray into the area was his The Circle of Operations of the Logical Calculus.25 This was followed by his mammoth Lectures on the Algebra of Logic, in three 23  Further discussion of Bolzano and his logic can be found in Sebestic (2011) and Rusnock and George (2004). 24  I will often, as is standard in algebra, write things of the form a × b as ab. 25  Der Operationskreis des Logikkalküls, Leipzig: Teubner, 1877.

408   Graham Priest volumes.26 The second part of Vol. 3 was published posthumously, edited by Karl Eugen Müller. Volumes 1 and 2 contain an exposition of what would now be called Boolean algebra. In Volume 1, the objects concerned are thought of as classes; in Volume 2, they are thought of as propositions. (A proposition, Schröder notes, following Boole, may be identified with the set of times at which it is true.) There are two special objects, 1 and 0. 1 represents the set of all the objects (times) in the domain of inquiry; 0 represents the empty collection. There are three main operations, union (disjunction), +; intersection (conjunction), ×; and complementation (negation), now standardly indicated by an overline: a is whatever it is that remains when the members of a are taken away from those in 1. Schröder discusses the relations between these various notions, such as a + a = 1. aa = 0. He proves that there is no way of deducing the distribution law, a(b + c) = ab + ac, from other standard principles concerning + and ×, by showing that the other principles, but not distribution, hold in a structure which would now be called a non-distributive lattice. This may be the first appearance of both such a lattice, and an independence proof in logic. (Independence proofs of this kind had been known in geometry for some time.) Of special importance is the relation of subsethood (subsumption), a ≤ b—which Schröder takes as primitive, but which may be defined as ab = a. Using this, one may algebraicize standard logical reasoning. Thus, take the syllogism (Barbara): All as are bs; all bs are cs; hence all as are cs. The premises may be written as a ≤ b and b ≤ c. Operating on these equations by algebraic rules, one may deduce the conclusion, a ≤ c. Thus, we are given that ab = a and bc = b. Hence, ac = (ab)c = a(bc) = ab = a. That is, a ≤ c. Schröder departs from Boole in small but significant ways. Notably, he interprets + as inclusive. For Boole, a + b is defined only if a and b are disjoint (that is, ab = 0); this causes a number of unnecessary complexities. Secondly, Boole needed a way to express the thought that a and b are not disjoint. To do this, he introduced a special symbol, ν, where νa is to be interpreted as some non-deterministically determined non-empty subset of b. The fact that a and b overlap can then be expressed by νa = νb. The notion ν is both of dubious intelligibility and complex to operate with. Schröder does not dispense with ν, but does not need it. Unlike Boole, he operates with inequalities as well as equalities. He can therefore express overlap simply as: ab ≠ 0. There are inelegancies in Schröder’s own system, though. The symbol ‘=’, and so ‘≤’, does duty for more than one thing. Thus, we find him writing things such as: (a ≤ b)(b ≤ c) ≤ (a ≤ c). Here, if the main ‘≤’ is to be interpreted as subsethood, the things on either side of it must be sets. Hence, a ≤ c, for example, must be interpreted a + c. This is possible because a ≤ c iff a + c = 1. However, the failure to draw this important conceptual distinction betokens an unfortunate confusion. In Volume 2, and following Peirce, Schröder introduces a notion that may be thought of as quantification. He writes things such as ∑ ai to mean the (possibly infinite) sum of i all things of the form ai, where the i can take a value from some predetermined range. Similarly, he writes things such as ∏ ai to mean the (possibly infinite) product of all i

26 

Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, Leipzig: Teubner. Vol. 1, 1890; Vol. 2, 1891; Vol. 3, Pt. 1, 1895; Vol. 3, Pt. 2, 1905. The work has not been translated into English as far as I know. But a modern German version was published with New York, NY: Chelsea, 1966.

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    409 things of the form ai. If one thinks of i as a free variable, this is some form of quantification. However, in virtue of the algebraic context in which Schröder is working, it arguably makes more sense to take ∑ and ∏ to be the infinitary generalizations of + and ×. If so, the notation is not so much a precursor of the notion of quantification, as that of languages where the formulas can be of infinite length, infinitary logic.27 The following is also worth noting. Modern presentations of algebras are axiomatic. That is, axioms concerning the algebra are laid down, and then theorems of the algebra are deduced. In a posthumously published essay, ‘Outline of the Algebra of Logic’ (also edited by Müller),28 he does offer something like a list of axioms; but in the Lectures the algebra is not developed axiomatically. Volume 2 of the Lectures is devoted to the topic of the algebra of relations, developed by Peirce. If the objects in Volume 1 can be thought of as sets, the objects in Volume 2 can be thought of as relations (in modern understanding, sets of ordered pairs).  Schröder introduces appropriate operations on these, such as converse, a, and product,  a.b (in modern notation, xay iff 29 yax; and x(a.b)y iff ∃ z(xaz and zby)), and investigates their properties. It is certainly wrong to take the logic of relations to be unimportant for logic. In a certain sense, traditional logic recognizes only monadic properties, not binary relations (or relations of higher arity). The recognition and incorporation of relations into the syntax of logic was a key feature in increasing the power of logic. However, Schröder’s main concern in this volume is not so much with the application of the algebra of relations to logic, but to areas such as set theory. Hence, we may pass over this topic here. There is no doubt that Schröder was an original thinker, and that he made important contributions to the nascent discipline of set theory, as it was being developed by the likes of Cantor and Dedekind. He certainly introduced novelties in logic as well, such as algorithms for operating on systems of equations. However, it must be said that both Boole and Peirce were much more original in their thinking about the algebra of logic, and that Schröder’s main contribution to this area was in the systematic exposition and polishing of others’ thought.30

20.8  Frege and Begriffschrift The same cannot be said of Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), who must count as one of the most original logicians in its history. The nineteenth century was not only an epoch in which abstract algebra developed. It was also an epoch of increasing rigour in mathematics. In particular, a whole menagerie of kinds 27 

On infinitary logic, see Bell (2012). Abriss der Algebra der Logik, Leipzig: Tuebner. Pt. 1, 1909; Pt. 2, 1910. This may also be found in the 1966 version of the Lectures. 29  Logicians’ jargon for ‘if and only if’. 30  Discussions of Boole and Peirce can be found in Hailperin (2004) and Hilpinen (2004), respectively. Schröder is discussed in Pekhaus (2004). All three are discussed in Grattan-Guiness (2000), chs. 2 and 4. 28 

410   Graham Priest of number was known: natural numbers (0, 1, 2), rational numbers (1/2, 3/5), real numbers (π, 0.1111·), complex numbers ( −1, 2 + 3i), infinitesimals (used in the differential and integral calculus); but how exactly to understand these, and even how to operate with them exactly, was not really clear. (It is worth noting that the only branch of mathematics that had received an axiomatic treatment by this time was geometry.) The nineteenth century organized the zoo. Weierstrass and others showed how to do the calculus without appealing to infinitesimals; and they disappeared from the zoo entirely. Argand showed how complex numbers could be understood as pairs of real numbers. Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor showed how real numbers could be seen as sets of rational numbers; and Tannery showed how rational numbers could be seen as sets of pairs of natural numbers.31 So by the time we arrive at Frege, all the numbers could be seen as set-theoretic constructions out of the natural numbers. But what of the natural numbers themselves? Frege set out to show that they could be seen as constructions out of just sets, and, moreover, that set theory was simply part of logic. To do this, he needed a language to express his ideas clearly, and, additionally, to draw inferences employing his concepts in a clear and rigorous way. Traditional logic was up to neither of these tasks. He had read Trendelenberg, Boole, and Lotze, but in none of them did he find what he needed. So he invented it, and called it ‘Begriffsschrift’. This was published in his A Formula Language of Pure Thought Modelled upon the Formula Language of Arithmetic32—known nowadays simply as the Begriffsschrift—a book that barely exceeds 100 pages in modern editions. Two subsequent books made the mathematical application of the language/logic that Frege envisaged; and a number of later essays articulated many of the philosophical ideas underpinning it. Three of the most important of these are ‘Function and Concept’, ‘On Sense and Reference’, and ‘On Concept and Object’.33 The sentences of Frege’s formal language and their component parts were taken to have objective content, as for Lotze (and Bolzano). If A is a formula of the language, Frege writes –A for its content. A vertical line indicates that a content is judged to be true. So ├ A means that the content of A is judged true. Psychology is thus separated from content right at the start. In ‘On Sense and Reference’, and in an attempt to explain why, for example, ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’ has a different content from ‘Hesperus is Phospherus’, even though ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ refer to the same object, Frege comes to advocate a bicameral theory of content. Sentences and their parts have both a sense (Sinn) and a reference (Bedeutung). This does not play a role in the Begriffsschrift, however, content operating purely on the level of reference. Sentences of the Begriffsschrift are constructed from basic (atomic) sentences. In a major break with the Aristotelian tradition, these are not necessarily of subject/predicate form. They are constituted by a verb phrase and the appropriate number of noun phrases, thus, for example: Sm, Ljm (which might express the claims, respectively, that Mary sings and that John loves Mary). (In the symbolism, and conventionally, the verb phrase is written 31 

See Priest (1998). Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Halle: L. Nebert, 1879. Translated as Bynum (1972). 33  Funktion und Begriff, Jena: H. Pohle, 1891, ‘Über Begriff und Gegenstand’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 16: 192–205 (1892). ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosopische Kritik, 100: 25–50 (1892). All three essays are translated into English in Geach and Black (1952). 32 

Nineteenth-Century German Logic    411 at the start of the sentence.) The objective content of a noun phrase is the object it denotes. The objective content of a verb phrase, Frege calls a concept. This is a function in the mathematical sense. There are two special objects called truth values: the true, t, and the false, f. The content of a verb phrase is a function that maps the appropriate number of objects to one of these. Thus, the content of ‘S’ might be a function that maps an object to t iff that object is singing. And the content of ‘L’ might be a function that maps a pair of objects to t iff the first loves the second. The content of the whole sentence is the truth value you get when you apply the function which is the content of the verb phrase to the objects which are the contents of the noun phrases. The rest of the sentences in the Begriffsschrift are generated from the atomic sentences by applying various grammatical constructions, which can be iterated recursively. The first kind of construction comprises connectives: ¬ (it is not the case that), ⊃ (if . . . then . . . 34), ∧ (and), ∨ (or). (Some of these can be defined in terms of others; Frege takes ¬ and ⊃ as basic.) Traditional logic (though not medieval logic) recognizes only two binary connectives (∨ and ⊃) and does not iterate them. But Frege, following the algebraists, and mindful of what mathematicians need to express, was well aware that it makes perfectly good sense to say things of the form A ⊃ (B ⊃ C). The objective content of a connective is a function, and the content of a sentence formed by a connective applied to some sentences is obtained by applying the function which is the content of the connective to the truth values which are the contents of the sentences. Thus, the content of ¬ is a function which maps t to f and vice versa. The content of ⊃ is a function that maps the pair a, b to f iff a is t and b is f; other pairs of truth functions get mapped to the value f. The other kind of grammatical construction involved in generating complex sentences comprises quantifiers. This constitutes another, and perhaps the most significant, break from traditional logic. For Aristotle, quantifier phrases such as ‘some man’ and ‘no woman’ are of the same grammatical kind as noun phrases such as ‘John’ and ‘Mary’. But once relations enter the picture this leads to problems. Thus, ‘every man loves some woman’ is ambiguous, depending on whether it means ‘every man loves some woman or other’ (maybe his mother), or it means that there is some woman whom every man loves (same woman in each case, maybe the Virgin Mary). How to account for this ambiguity? Given any sentence, A(n), containing a noun phrase, n, we can replace this with a variable, x, to obtain A(x). We can then prefix this with a quantifier phrase ∀ x, ∃ x (all x are such that, some x is such that). ∀ xA(x) is true (i.e. has the content t) just if whatever object we were to take x to refer to, A(x) would be true. Similarly, ∃ xA(x) is true just if there is some object we can take x to refer to which would make A(x) true. The ambiguity noted is then explained by the order in which the quantifier phrases are applied. Thus, the difference is that between ∀ x ∃ yRxy and ∃ y ∀ xRxy. It is worth noting that this sort of ambiguity had played havoc in mathematics in the period leading up to Frege. A (real-valued) function, f, is continuous (smooth) if for every ε, however small, some δ is such that if you make the difference between x and y less than δ, the

34 

Though it was orthodox to read the symbol in this way in the first half of the twentieth century, this is highly problematic. Frege is very careful not to read it like this. His gloss is more like: it is not the case that (. . . and not . . .).

412   Graham Priest δ

n

δ

A−n