Understanding German Idealism

Will Dudley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844650958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317493303
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Understanding German Idealism" provides an accessible introduction to the philosophical movement that emerged in 1781, with the publication of Kant's monumental "Critique of Pure Reason", and ended fifty years later, with Hegel's death. The thinkers of this period, and the themes they developed revolutionized almost every area of philosophy and had an impact that continues to be felt across the humanities and social sciences today. Notoriously complex, the central texts of German Idealism have confounded the most capable and patient interpreters for more than 200 years. "Understanding German Idealism" aims to convey the significance of this philosophical movement while avoiding its obscurity. Readers are given a clear understanding of the problems that motivated Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and the solutions that they proposed. Dudley outlines the main ideas of transcendental idealism and explores how the later German Idealists attempted to carry out the Kantian project more rigorously than Kant himself, striving to develop a fully self-critical and rational philosophy, in order to determine the meaning and sustain the possibility of a free and rational modern life. The book examines some of the most important early criticisms of German Idealism and the philosophical alternatives to which they led, including romanticism, Marxism, existentialism, and naturalism.

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Introduction: modernity, rationality and freedom

German Idealism emerged in 1781, with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and ended fifty years later, with Hegel’s death. The intervening half-century was without question one of the most important and influential in the history of philosophy. The thinkers of this period, and the themes they developed, revolutionized every area of philosophy, and had an impact that continues to be felt across the humanities and social sciences. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – the four most important German Idealists – paved the way for Marx and Kierkegaard, phenomenology and existentialism, critical theory and poststructuralism, and in doing so left a mark that remains highly visible in contemporary social and political theory, religious studies and aesthetics. Reactions to German Idealism, especially those of the neo-Kantians, logical positivists and Bertrand Russell, were also instrumental in the founding of analytic philosophy, which today reveals and benefits from an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of the European philosophical tradition. German Idealism thus lies at the root of both continental and Anglo-American philosophy, and without it there could have been neither the sharp schism between the two that defined the discipline for much of the twentieth century, nor the resources that sustain current hopes of understanding and overcoming this unproductive intellectual sectarianism.

The significance of German Idealism is, unfortunately, matched by its notorious complexity. Its central texts have confounded the most capable and patient interpreters for more than 200 years. Much of this difficulty can be attributed to the challenge the German Idealists faced in trying to find appropriate means of expression for genuinely new ideas. But some of it seems unnecessary, the result of writing that could have been improved, and that deters even intelligent readers with the best of intentions.

Understanding German Idealism is an attempt to convey the significance of this philosophical movement while avoiding its obscurity. Such an effort must be selective in its treatment of thinkers and themes, restricted in scope to only the most important aspects of the most important works of the most important authors. But it is my aim to achieve clarity regarding these essential developments without resorting to oversimplification. If this book is successful, its readers will come away with a sound understanding of the problems that motivated Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and of the solutions that they proposed. I hope such readers will be persuaded that the profundity and value of these ideas more than repay the intellectual struggle they require, and that they will be inspired to spend more time working through the details of the original texts on their own.

Modernity, rationality and freedom

The proximate philosophical cause of German Idealism was the scepticism of David Hume (1711–76), which Kant famously described in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science as “the very thing that ... first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy” (P: 57). But the larger cultural trend that gave rise to both the Critique of Pure Reason and, eight years later, the French Revolution, was the Enlightenment insistence on replacing the premodern acceptance of unjustified authority with the modern demand for rational justification and freedom. The French Revolution promised to supplant inherited monarchy with a truly modern life that would establish and secure freedom for all; Kant promised to supplant inherited dogmatism with a truly modern philosophy that would establish and secure the limits of rational cognition and action.

The modern insistence that belief and action be rationally justified is, in principle if not always in practice, radically egalitarian and radically liberating. If wisdom and power are vested in a special authority, such as a monarch or a priest, ordinary people must defer to that authority for instructions regarding what to think and what to do. But if good reasons are the only legitimate authority, then everyone can lay equal claim to being able to participate in the process of offering and evaluating the arguments that justify our theoretical and practical commitments. And those who do participate in this process achieve emancipation to the extent that their thoughts and actions are no longer determined by external authorities, but rather by themselves. Such modern agents are, in virtue of the exercise of their own rationality, self-determining or free.

The most obvious impediment to replacing the rule of traditional authorities with the liberating self-rule of reason is the authorities themselves, who are rarely inclined to forfeit the power and deference to which they are accustomed. But Kant worries, in a justly famous essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, that an even more intransigent obstacle is internal: cowardice on the part of those who would be free. He declares the motto of the Enlightenment to be Sapere aude! – dare to know! – and he equates this with daring to live up to the nature of Homo sapiens.

Freedom requires courage, Kant believes, because it is much easier and more comfortable to rely on others for direction. Rethinking established beliefs is hard work, as is breaking out of established patterns of action. It is less complicated to persist in our old habits, and to allow others to do our thinking for us. Indeed, the tendency to rely on others can itself become habitual, making it even more difficult to abandon the guidance of advisors or purported experts in favour of the free use of our own understanding.

The call to freedom is thus more easily issued than answered. The prospect of throwing off authority is exhilarating, but also frightening. And even those who are brave enough to accept the challenge face a long and arduous task. Liberation cannot be accomplished overnight, but requires an exhaustive and ongoing labour of self-critique. It is this task – the task of examining and re-examining our existing practices and beliefs – to which Kant calls us, in the hope that our response will contribute to human enlightenment and freedom.

Empiricism, scepticism and determinism

If Hume is right, however, Kant’s hope is destined to go unfulfilled, for neither courage nor effort can bring about the impossible. Hume contends that the ultimate basis of belief and action is custom or habit, rather than reason, and that our habits are strictly determined by the same natural necessity that governs the entire physical universe. If this is so, then the Enlightenment dream of autonomous subjects forming rationally governed polities is threatened not only by monarchs, priests, cowardice and laziness, but also by inescapable truths of metaphysics and epistemology: human knowledge rests on faith; human behaviour is completely explicable in terms of mechanistic forces; and self-determination is an unattainable fantasy.

Hume’s scepticism and determinism are the result of his empiricism, to which he was absolutely committed, and from which he rigorously and relentlessly drew the consequences. Empiricism is founded on the principle that all ideas come from sensory experience, an assumption Hume inherited from his great predecessors, John Locke and George Berkeley. Hume introduces two new distinctions, however, that enable him to take empiricism to its logical conclusion.

Hume first distinguishes between impressions, which are the direct results of sensory experience, and ideas, which are copies of impressions. The feeling I have when I bang my toe on a rock is an impression of pain. My recollection of that feeling the next day is the idea of pain. Hume’s version of the empiricist principle states that all ideas come from impressions, either directly or as the result of mental activities that manipulate impressions to form new ideas. The ideas of “horse” and “horn”, for example, are copies of our sensory impressions of the corresponding entities. The idea of “unicorn”, however, results from our imaginative combination of the ideas of “horse” and “horn”, and designates a fictional beast to which no known entity corresponds.

Hume’s second novel distinction is that between relations of ideas and matters of fact. Matters of fact are actual states of affairs about which we can learn only through experience of the world. Relations of ideas are definitional truths that can be deduced from the meaning of the terms involved. It is true by definition, and thus a relation of ideas known by every competent speaker of English, that all bachelors are unmarried. Whether or not bachelors need to eat more vegetables, however, is a matter of fact that can be discerned only through a careful study of the relevant population.

Hume claims that matters of fact and relations of ideas exhaust the types of possible objects of knowledge, and he employs this distinction to mount a devastating attack on rationalism. The great rationalists – including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz – wary of being deceived by the senses, and impressed by the demonstrable progress in mathematics, attempted to ascertain important truths about the world through the use of reason alone. Spinoza’s Ethics, modelled explicitly on Euclid’s Geometry, epitomizes this approach: it proceeds from a small set of simple definitions and axioms to deduce a large number of complicated propositions and corollaries. According to Hume’s schema, however, Spinoza’s work is nothing more than an elaborate investigation of the relations of certain ideas. It may tell us a great deal about the implicit content of Spinoza’s definition of “substance”, but only empirical investigation can tell us whether such substance exists. Metaphysics, in other words, aspires to inform us about matters of fact, and therefore cannot be done on the model of mathematics, but rather must give way to science.

Having insisted that knowledge of matters of fact can be had only through observation of the world, Hume employs his distinction between ideas and impressions to eliminate unwarranted conclusions that careful observation does not support. His principle, which functions much like Ockham’s razor, is that only two types of ideas are admissible in our accounts of the world: (1) those that are direct copies of impressions we have experienced, and (2) those that provide the best explanation of the impressions we have experienced. “Dog” is an example of the first type of idea because we have had many impressions of dogs. “Dinosaur” is an example of the second type of idea because although no human has ever had an impression of a dinosaur, the best explanation of the fossils we have found is that they were the bones of a once-living but now-extinct group of reptiles. An alternative explanation of these fossils is that they were planted by a mischievous fossil-fairy, but because we have no experience of fairies (mischievous, fossil-depositing, or otherwise), “fossil-fairy” is an idea that must be expunged from our accounts of the world (although it might be put to perfectly good use in children’s stories).

Hume’s insistence that all matters of fact be explained in terms of ideas traceable to impressions does away with much more than the fanciful creatures of childhood imagination. If Hume is right, then God, the self and causality are further casualties of the empiricist principle. The common use of these ideas is, in Hume’s view, wholly unwarranted by the facts. We have impressions of particular internal states – such as pain, pleasure, heat and cold – but none of the “self ” to whom these states purportedly belong. We have impressions of constantly conjoined phenomena – such as the freezing of water every time the temperature falls below 32 degrees Fahrenheit – but none of the purportedly necessary connection or “cause” that binds them together. We have impressions of the world, but have no credible basis for attributing the creation of this world to a “God”, the likes of which we have never encountered.

Kant will challenge Hume’s position on each of these three ideas, but it is the attack on causality that leads most directly to scepticism and determinism, and thus inspires the development and defence of the alternative to empiricism with which German Idealism begins.

The attack on causality is especially significant because, as Hume points out, all of our knowledge of matters of fact, other than those of which we are directly aware or retain in our memory, depends upon causal inference. He suggests, for example, that if we were to find a watch on a deserted island we would reasonably infer that other humans had been there before us, for the presence of the watch requires some explanation, and humans are the only beings we have ever known to make and carry watches. The conjunction between watches and human watch-owners has been constant, in other words, and it is the constancy of this conjunction that warrants our causal inference and enables us to account for the watches that we occasionally encounter in unusual places.

Hume’s insight, however, is that constant conjunction is not equivalent to necessary connection, and thus it is possible that any causal inference, although based upon all available experience, will prove to be false. The watch could have been deposited on the beach by God, or forgotten by a sunbathing alien, or grown on a nearby tree. More plausibly, the watch could have washed up on shore after falling into the ocean from a passing ship. In any of these scenarios, we would be wrong to conclude from the presence of the watch on the beach that humans had already been on the island.

The lesson Hume draws is that our knowledge of matters of fact can never have the same status as our knowledge of relations of ideas. Relations of ideas can be demonstratively proven to be necessarily true, through the use of deductive reason, because their opposites contradict the meaning of the terms in question, and are thus logically impossible. All bachelors are necessarily unmarried, because to get married is, by definition, to forfeit one’s bachelorhood. All Euclidean triangles necessarily have interior angles that sum to 180 degrees, because having interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees is demonstrably incompatible with meeting the conditions that define triangularity in Euclidean geometry. Matters of fact, by contrast, cannot be demonstrated to be necessarily true, because their opposites are not logically impossible. Bachelors may in fact eat too few vegetables, but perhaps unmarried males will someday develop better eating habits. The signs that tell motorists in the USA to yield the right of way are in fact yellow triangles, but a future international commission could resolve to make them purple trapezoids.

Knowledge of matters of fact thus rests not on deductive proof, but rather on inductive generalization: we attend carefully to all of our past experience, identify the most constantly conjoined phenomena, conclude that these stand in relation of cause-and-effect, and predict they will remain conjoined in the future. “Water has always frozen at 32 degrees Fahrenheit” becomes “Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit”. “The sun has always risen every 24 hours” becomes “The sun rises every 24 hours”. Further experience may lead us to revise our conclusions (“Water with a sufficiently high salt content freezes at 28 degrees”), but this process of revision is also based on induction.

Inductive reasoning is the foundation of science, and is thoroughly indispensable to our successful navigation of the world. Without relying on induction we could not safely cross the street, much less build computers and send rockets into space. Induction is a tool we literally cannot live without, and a tool that enables us to live very well.

But the problem with inductive reasoning, which Hume recognized and made famous, is that our reliance on it is not rational. Such reasoning takes the following general form: in the past, x has always been the case; therefore, in the future, x will be the case. The question Hume forces us to consider is this: what justifies inferences of this form? The justification is not deductive, for it is not a logical necessity that the future should resemble the past. So the justification must be inductive (since deduction and induction exhaust the types of reasoning): we believe that the future will resemble the past because in the past the future has resembled the past. But attempting to justify the practice of inductive inference on the basis of an inductive inference is clearly circular. Such an attempt employs, and thus takes for granted as a hidden premise, the very form of inference that it is supposed to justify: in the past, x has always been the case; therefore, in the future, x will be the case. Despite its reliability and indispensability, then, inductive inference lacks a rational justification.

Hume emphasizes that the inability of reason to justify induction does not mean we should no longer use this form of inference. We have no choice. But he wants us to recognize that our knowledge of matters of fact, all of which rests on causal inferences, all of which are inductive, ultimately rests on habit or custom rather than reason. We are in the habit of expecting the future to resemble the past, and this habit has served us well. We expect it to continue to serve us well. But there is no rational justification for this expectation. Why the future should resemble the past, we cannot say. And thus no matter how regular our experience has been to date, we have no reason for expecting the future course of events to resemble it. What we have is a deep-seated faith.

Scepticism regarding the capacity of reason to justify our beliefs about matters of fact is thus the first important consequence of Hume’s attack on causality. The second important consequence of this attack is determinism.

It might seem surprising that Hume’s analysis of causation as constant conjunction would lead him to deny free will. After all, if free will is understood as the capacity to make decisions and initiate actions that are not necessitated by prior conditions and causal forces, then the recognition that we have no impression of necessary connection binding events together might appear to provide an opening for the operation of freedom.

Hume points out, however, that we have no impression of free will either, and then offers an account of the fact that we are nonetheless prone to ascribe this capacity to ourselves. He suggests that we tend to consider ourselves free because we do not experience ourselves as subject to the strict causal necessitation that we attribute to nature. But if, as Hume has argued, there is no basis for regarding nature as causally necessitated, then there is also no basis for regarding ourselves as qualitatively different from natural entities. The “necessity” we attribute to nature is simply shorthand for the fact that we have observed natural phenomena to be conjoined with each other in highly regular and predictable ways. But human behaviour is also highly regular and predictable, Hume points out, and thus subject to necessity in precisely the same sense. Of course our behaviour is not perfectly predictable, but neither is the weather. Weather patterns and patterns of human behaviour are highly complex, and sometimes surprising, but they are both correlated to discernible factors in observable ways, and the more extensively and carefully we observe these correlations, the better we become at predicting the resulting outcomes of given sets of conditions. If we are not prepared to grant free will to storm systems, then...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: modernity, rationality and freedom
• 2 Kant: transcendental idealism
• 3 Sceptical challenges and the development of transcendental idealism
• 4 Fichte: towards a scientific and systematic idealism
• 5 Schelling: idealism and the absolute
• 6 Hegel: systematic philosophy without foundations
• 7 Conclusion: rationality, freedom and modernity?
• Questions for discussion and revision
• Further reading
• References
• Chronology
• Index