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The emergence of German idealism I edited by Michael Baur and Daniel 0 . Dahlstrom.

p. cm. - (Studies in philosophy and the history of philosophy ; v. 34) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Idealism, German. I. Baur, Michael. II. Dahlsu·om,

Daniel 0 . III. Series. B2 1.S78 vol.34 1999 (B2849.I3) 141 '.0943-dc21 98-30101 ISBN o-8132--0928-5 (alk. paper)

Introduction

MICHAEL BAUR AND DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy," as he himself characterizes it, is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant goes to considerable lengths to disestablish the sort of speculative metaphys­ics that is erected on the premise that the human mind can have a clear and distinct, that is to say, a purely intellectual, nonsensory insight into the natures and causes of things. Yet, remarkably, within a generation, Kant's own efforts give way to one putatively new system of speculative metaphysics after the other, each claiming to complete h is project by, among other things, applying the principles of the critical philosophy to that philosophy itself. Part of the reason for this development can be found in Kant's own thinking. For by no means does his skepticism about speculative metaphysics extend to all forms of a priori knowledge or to all nonempirical principles of human experience. H is critical phi­losophy is, again in h is own terms, also a "transcendental philosophy," one aimed at determining the principles that render a particular region of human endeavor-knowing, acting, enjoying-possible. In the minds of Kant's prominent critics, however, the task of identifying and recur­sively demonstrating these transcendental principles and their unity re­quires reintroducing speculative metaphysics or something closely akin to it. A redefined metaphysics accordingly takes shape in a German ide­alism that, nevertheless, sees its speculations, in the manner just de­scribed, as a consequence of Kant's transcendental philosophy.

The preceding account of German idealism's development from its Kantian roots is, of necessity, highly abbreviated and, it must be con­fessed, a bit presumptuous. For, in truth, the exceedingly complex story of the critical yet speculative reaction to Kant's philosophy from 1786 to i807 (from the publication of Reinhold's Letters on the KantianPhiwsophy to the publication ofHegel's Phenomenowgy of Spirit) has never been fully

2 MICHAEL BAUR AND DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM

told and, indeed, with good reason since it is a story replete with the thrusts, parries, and counterthrusts of a variety of thinkers, some of whom historians have largely forgotten or neglected, with their own de­veloping and often divergent views on the prospects of philosophy after Kant. As a consequence, suitably informed accounts and philosophically reasoned assessments of the thought that led to the emergence of Ger­man idealism from Kant's transcendental philosophy have been in short supply. The present volume cannot remedy this lack, but it is an attempt to contribute to an understanding of some of the major factors and con­siderations that led to or attended the metaphysical speculations of Ger­man philosophers after Kant. In addition to ten new essays on the emer­gence of German idealism, the present volume contains translations of three significant German and French investigations of post-Kantian thought, hitherto unavailable in English.

Before turning to the post-Kantian thinkers themselves, however, it may prove useful to review the parameters of Kant's transcendental phi­losophy and, in particular, given subsequent concerns about the pur­ported lack of unity to Kant's philosophy and about the inadequacy of its foundation, to consider how Kant himself construed the unity of his philosophy. This issue is the subject of the opening essay, 'The Unity of Kant's Critical Philosophy" by Daniel 0. Dahlstrom. Taking his cues from the three questions in which, in Kant's view, all the interests of reason come together ("What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for?"), Dahlstrom surveys the basic arguments and conclusions of Kant's critical writings. The aim of the survey is to indicate in what sense Kant believed himself to have found in the principle of purpo­siveness, as elaborated in the Critique of judgment, a principle capable of mediating between the principles governing the theoretical order of sci­ence and the practical order of freedom, in short, the principles of na­ture and of morality, demonstrated in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, respectively.

Among the handful of thinkers who figured prominently in the early reception of Kant's critical philosophy, arguably none is more central than the intriguing ex-priest and Freemason from Vienna, Karl Leon­hard Reinhold. Probably no work, for example, is more responsible for instilling and spreading not only interest in Kant's philosophy but also the need for critical engagement with it than Reinhold's Briefe uber die Kantische Philosophie of 1786-1787. Yet, until recently, Reinhold's role in the emergence of German idealism has been largely ignored. In his essay "Karl Leonard Reinhold: ' ... Endeavoring to keep up the pace mit un­serem Zeitalter;'" Alexander von Schonborn takes some important steps toward rectifying this situation by demonstrating how profoundly Rein-

Introduction 3

hold's program of Elementarphilosophie, conceived as an attempt to com­plete the critical philosophy by grounding it in a single first principle, shapes the philosophical projects of the post-Kantian idealists. But Schonborn also dispels the neo-Kantian myth, concocted on the basis of this influence, that Reinhold is significant only as a harbinger of "the fall into metaphysical mysticism." In addition to tracing the several changes Reinhold made to his system within the general ambit of German ideal­ism, Schonborn also recounts how Reinhold's turn to realism and con­cern with the philosophy of language provoked an intemperate reac­tion by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel that consisted in caricature rather than careful consideration of Reinhold's reasoning. The result was yet another myth, the neo-Hegelian myth that Reinhold's significance lay merely in being a popularizer of philosophy and that, like the public, he lacked the autonomy of thought requisite of a serious philosopher. In the course of demolishing this myth and reviewing the development of Reinhold's thought, Schonborn demonstrates that Reinhold is not merely the initiator and knowledgeable reformer of much that is pres­ent in post-Kantian philosophical systems, but also a profound critic of them, someone both ready and able to move beyond them.

The importance of Reinhold for the early reception of Kant's philoso­phy is further corroborated by the next essay in the volume, "The Role of Skepticism in the Emergence of German Idealism" by Michael Baur. In this essay Baur seeks to dispel the popular myth that the post-Kantian German idealists were uncritical speculative metaphysicians with little concern for the skeptical problems that had first aroused Kant from his dogmatic slumber. In fact, the development of thought from Kant to Hegel is best described, Baur argues, not as a repudiation or mitiga­tion of skepticism, but rather as a radicalization and deepening of it. The radicalization of skepticism, however, does not mark a departure from systematic philosophy. The movement from Kant to Hegel is paral­leled by the emergence of the insight that systematic philosophy can re­spond adequately to skepticism only by demonstrating the fundamental identity-in-difference between skepticism and itself. Baur substantiates these claims by tracing some of the crucial steps taken on the intellectual journey from Kant to Hegel, for example: the early skeptical attacks upon Kant's philosophy; Reinhold's attempt to salvage transcendental philosophy by reformulating it as a descriptive philosophy of conscious­ness; G. E. Schulze's skeptical assault on Reinhold's attempt and on the idea of transcendental philosophy in general; Fichte's creative appropri­ation of Schulze's critique; and finally, Hegel's transformation of the Fichtean strategy and mediated return to the starting point of this pro­cess of skeptical awakening: David Hume.

4 MICHAEL BAUR AND DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM

Fichte's philosophy, in particular, his unique brand ofrealism and the primacy he accords the practical, is the' subject of the next two essays. In "Fichte's Abstract Realism," Daniel Breazeale addresses the seeming contradiction between Fichte's claim concerning the allegedly absolute character of the self and Fichte's apparent admission that there is an external "check" upon this very same self. Breazeale's resolution of the difficulty emphasizes both the absoluteness of the self and the irreduc­ibility of the "check" to the activity of the self. The label of "abstract realism" appropriately captures both sides of the Fichtean position: Fichte is a "realist" since the self's other is ultimately irreducible to the activity of the self; however, this realism is abstract, since it does not en­tail the actual existence of any particular object outside of the self. That is, Fichte's realism does not imply the givenness of any particular object to the self, but only the (practical) givenness of a task, namely, the self's infinite task of undertaking a determination within itself. For Breazeale, it would be accurate to describe the Fichtean self as a living contradic­tion. In order for the self to be conscious of its own finitude (and thus in order for it to be a self at all), the self must recognize some limit upon itself. However, if the limit is a limit for the self (as it must be), then the self automatically transcends the limit in the very act of acknowledging it. Hence, the self is simultaneously both limited and unlimited. Breaze­ale unpacks the various ways in which the self can be said to experience the "check" by which it recognizes its own limitedness: as "feeling" on an immediate and abstract level; as the "summons" of another free being within the richer context of intersubjectivity; or (on an existential and philosophical level) as an "affront" to a proudly idealistic self that would deny its dependence on all givenness or contingency.

In his essay "Fichte's Appeal Today: The Hidden Primacy of the Practi­cal," Karl Ameriks contends that the radical nature and the limitations of Fichte's doctrine of the primacy of the practical have not been ade­quately appreciated, even by Fichte's most ardent contemporary admir­ers. Unlike Kant, Fichte held that no theoretical philosophy whatsoever, not even a critical metaphysics of transcendental idealism, is capable of rescuing our ordinary belief in our inner freedom. Fichte accordingly argued that pure practical reason must be methodologically prior to the­oretical reason; only our prior commitment to freedom can save both the existence of a world beyond mere representations and the claims of the moral law upon us (neither of which theoretical philosophy would be able to deliver in any case). Ameriks argues that Fichte's radicalized assertion of the primacy of the practical is problematic in several re­spects, accounting for the endeavor, undertaken by contemporary fol-

Introduction 5

lowers ofFichte, to provide a non practical, "neutralized" demonstration of the absoluteness of subjectivity. According to Ameriks, such strategies are ultimately inconsistent with Fichte's own argumentation, and they fail to address the latent ambiguities and difficulties of the Fichtean posi­tion. Until Fichte scholars give greater attention to these problems, it will not be possible, Ameriks concludes, to appreciate the full signifi­cance of Fichte's doctrine of the primacy of the practical.

The aesthetic turn in post-Kantian thinking takes center stage in the next collection of essays as the import of the work of Schiller, Holder­lin, and the romantics for the development of German idealism is addressed. In "Schiller and the Aesthetics of German Idealism," John McCumber aims to articulate the "middle term" by which we might understand how Schiller's aesthetics and ethics can be integrated with the metaphysics of German idealism. As Hegel notes, Schiller is to be praised for his intuition that the relation between sense and intellect is not one of indifference or domination, but one of harmony and accord. But unlike Hegel, Schiller holds that it is aesthetics, and not philosophy, that shows us how to achieve a proper harmony between intellect and sense. Furthermore, Schiller's aesthetic theory depends on an accep­tance of the Kantian thing-in-itself. Thus it is not clear how Schiller's aesthetics can be integrated with the metaphysics of German idealism, which requires no thing-in-itself. Even more problematically, it is not clear why the elimination of the thing-in-itself from German idealistic metaphysics does not lead to the view that truth consists in the domina­tion of reason over sense (as it does in Fichte). According to McCumber, Schiller himself suggests answers to these puzzles. For Schiller, sensible matter can be reconciled with reason and morality because it prefigures both. Thus, in a sense, Schiller does reject the thing-in-itself. Conversely, Hegel does not reject the thing-in-itself per se, but only the view that the thing-in-itself is an indeterminable "something" beyond experience. That is, Hegel understands the real as necessarily embodied. Since lan­guage for Hegel is the most perfect material embodiment of the intelli­gible, his metaphysics is perhaps best understood as linguistic metaphys­ics. As McCumber shows, our understanding of Hegel and Schiller in relation to one another enriches the meaning of both.

Another poet who figured prominently in the emergence of German idealism is the friend and classmate of Hegel and Schelling in the Tub­inger Stift, Johann Christian Friederich Holderlin. However, while ac­knowledging Holderlin's importance to the genesis of German idealism (as evidenced by consideration of the fragment 'The Earliest System­Programme of German Idealism"), Karsten Harries argues that German

6 MICHAEL BAUR AND DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM

idealism could develop as it did only bec~~1se Hegel and Schelling were able to leave their former friend behind, rejecting his elevation of aes­thetic intuition above theory and the attendant suggestion that philos­ophy is subordinate to poetry. Harries demonstrates how Holderlin wrestles in his poetry with the question of the contrasting import of Greek and Christian conceptions of divinity, a theme of great signifi­cance to the young idealists. Yet, as Harries points out, Holderlin could not reconcile himself, as could Hegel, to the loss of the perfect media­tion of sense and spirit ("paradigms of beauty") characteristic of Greek art and religion. As a result, according to Harries, Holderlin calls for the poet-not a philosopher, but a new embodiment of Christ and Greek gods-to assume "the essential task of mediating between the Highest and the people." From the point of view of an older Hegel, Holderlin becomes the "beautiful soul" with an adolescent nostalgia for a world that is no more, indulging in a melancholy typical of neoclassicism. But Harries also shows how Holderlin's more tragic understanding of history prevents him from following Hegel's reconciliatory Aufhebungof history. In a concluding segment, Harries comments on Holderlin's poem Patmos, in order to demonstrate how the poet balances "the escha­tological understanding of history common to both pietism and Hegel with a Sophoclean openness to the abyss."

If the work of Schiller and Holderlin cannot be ignored in any at­tempt to understand the development of post-Kantian philosophy, nei­ther can that of the German romantics: A. W. Schlegel and his brother Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Novalis, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. Yet, as Kenneth Schmitz shows in his essay 'The Idealism of the German Romantics," the relationship is thorn­ier since, among other things, it concerns the relation, sometimes criti­cal, sometimes sympathetic, not of a single writer, but of an entire liter­ary movement to the newly developing philosophical tradition. "There is no typical romantic," as Schmitz puts it, any more than there is a typical philosopher or even a typical idealist philosopher. Nevertheless, Schmitz demonstrates four post-Kantian themes in which romanticism and meta·· physical idealism fruitfully intersect: first, the organic wholeness of na­ture, expressed in the German conception of Geist; second, the under­standing of human subjectivity as a free but nonetheless natural part of that whole; third, an aesthetic and creative imagination as the power behind that freedom, a power that fuses the real with the ideal; and fourth, a critical attitude that takes its bearings from the oneness of all things, both real and ideal. In regard to this last point, Schmitz discusses how the metaphysics of creativity, embraced by the romantics and for-

Introduction 7

mulated by the idealists, differs from traditional metaphysics. The differ­ence, he maintains, lies in the new metaphysics' incorporation of infini­tude into its concept of Geist, and, in conclusion, Schmitz explains how, in the wake of Kant's critical philosophy, this incorporation became credible to romantics and idealists alike.

The development of the thought of Schelling and Hegel is the gen­eral theme of the last five essays of the volume, the first of which demon­strates the distinctively moral beginning of that development, evidenced by the contrasting ways in which Kant's doctrine of postulates figures in Schelling's and Hegel's early metaphysical projects.

Although Kant rejected the proofs presented by speculative meta­physics for the existence of an immortal soul, freedom, and God, these "ideas of reason," as he calls them, resurface as postulates of pure prac­tical (moral) reason. In other words, these metaphysical ideas have a proper place for Kant and that place is ethics. According to Klaus Dus­ing, Schelling's and Hegel's criticisms of Kant's foundational principles take place only in the wake of their response to the latter's doctrine of postulates. Hence, in order to appreciate their criticisms and the idealist metaphysics generated by them, it is necessary first to understand 'The Reception of Kant's Doctrine of Postulates in Schelling's and Hegel's Early Philosophical Projects," the subject and title ofDusing's essay. This essay recounts in detail the different ways in which Schelling and Hegel critically appropriate Kant's doctrine of postulates and idea of the high­est good in the course of elaborating their diverse ethical theories. Dus­ing shows how both Schelling's and Hegel's reconstructions of the doc­trine of postulates were shaped by, among other things, a dissatisfaction with the way the doctrine had been transformed and put to use in the theologies of professors at Tubingen. More importantly, Dusing demon­strates how the German idealists, taking to heart the ethical place ac­corded to metaphysical ideas by Kant, attempt in their early projects to establish metaphysics on an ethical foundation.

In his essay 'The Unconditioned in Knowing: I-Identity-Freedom" Hans Michael Baumgartner sets out to show how, from its inception, Schelling's philosophy is not so much a transcendental philosophy as it is a sustained attempt, using the concepts and argumentative strategies of transcendental philosophy, "to do justice to the conception of the absolute in the d1eoretical-philosophical realm." The absolute I, avail­able only through an intellectual intuition, is more fundamental than the sort of finite knowing and self-consciousness that generally frame the efforts of transcendental philosophy. At the same time, Baumgartner argues, this absolute I has a teleologically moral function in Schelling's

8 MICHAEL BAUR AND DANIEL D. DAHLSTROM

thought that binds "philosophy and the historical process together" in a manner that once again decisively departs from the parameters of the transcendental philosophy of his predecessors.

If Schelling breaks with transcendental philosophy in its Kantian and Fichtean senses, Xavier Tilliette shows that transcendental philosophy, in turn, casts a long shadow on Schelling's attempts to construct a meta­physics of the absolute, the content of which is freedom. Tilliette sketches how Schelling repeatedly wrestled with "The Problem of Meta­physics" (the title ofTilliette's piece) not only after Kant and Fichte but after Spinoza as well. The young Schelling moved, as Tilliette recounts, from the Fichtean-transcendental completion of philosophy in practical philosophy through several versions of philosophical systems to the sub­sumption of theoretical philosophy by a philosophy of nature in which the "metaphysical impulse" is generally diminished. At this juncture, as Tilliette puts it, "the serene and peaceful descriptions of Hen Kai Pan leave no room for the transcendental, and testify to a truce in Schelling's restless thought." Nonetheless, Tilliette points out, the term "metaphys­ics" recurs in Schelling's maturer stages of thought, albeit principally as an honorific title for "eitl1er the theory of potencies or, possible, positive philosophy, which in the last analysis resolves itself into the philosophy of religion."

In his essay "Von Hegel bis Hegel: Reflections on the 'Earliest System­Programme of German Idealism,"' Merold Westphal examines the "Ear­liest System-Programme of German Idealism" and its meaning for our understanding of Hegel in particular and German idealism in gen­eral. Three "un-Hegelian" themes stand out in the "Earliest System­Programme": the primacy of practical reason, the irrationality of the state, and the primacy of the aesthetic. These themes bear witness to Hegel's early affirmation of a moral-religious-ethical form of community that could provide a meaningful link to what is eternal, notwithstanding the irrational politics of the mechanized modern state. By contrast, the mature Hegel affirmed the primacy and autonomy of theory as the fun­damental means for achieving contact with an ultimate source of mean­ing. In sketching the basic trajectory of Hegel's career, Westphal shows how, in many ways, Hegel's development mirrors the development of German idealism itself, of which Hegel is so often seen to be the culmi­nation. Undoubtedly, Hegel's self-transformation from young Volkser­zieher to mature philosopher is deeply rooted in his own sense of disil­lusionment and resignation. However, this explanation may not suffi­ciently account for Hegel's later turn to philosophical speculation. And if that is the case, Westphal suggests, then perhaps there is more to be learned from Hegel and German idealism.

Introduction g

In "Hegel on Absolute Knowing," Martin De Nys offers three general and interrelated observations that collectively illuminate Hegel's devel­opment, his relation to Kant, and the meaning of his absolute idealism. First, De Nys shows how Hegel's early moral and religious thought aimed to preserve yet transcend the limiting dichotomies and distinctions of Kantian thought. In this early period, the concept of "love" emerged as paradigmatic for Hegel's understanding of how moral autonomy might be reconciled with receptivity to otherness. Secondly, De Nys explains how the account of apperception in the First Critique both presupposes and problematizes Kant's own sharp distinction between the receptivity of sensible intuition and the spontaneity of the understanding. Finally, De Nys shows how Hegel's account of absolute knowing settles the prob­lems that Hegel had left unresolved in the I 7gos, and reenacts, in a de­liberate and self-conscious way, Kant's simultaneous preserving and can­celing of the dichotomy between spontaneity and receptivity. Hegel's doc­trine of "absolute knowing" is thus surprisingly Kantian in its own way.

At the very beginning of the movement known as German idealism, Hegel and his schoolmates at the Tiibinger Stift struggled to understand and actualize the hidden possibilities ofKant's philosophy. This struggle is documented in the "Earliest System-Programme of German Ideal­ism," a fragment written down in Hegel's hand, but the authorship of which has been a source of considerable controversy. Diising concludes his study by arguing for Hegel's authorship of the "Earliest System­Programme," based in part on the way in which the doctrine of postu­lates surfaces in that fragment; Westphal, too, accepts the contention that Hegel is its author. Tilliette, on the other hand, affirms Schelling's authorship, while Harries cites reasons to see the stamp of Holderlin's thought in the work. A new translation of this important fragment is contained as an Appendix to the present volume.