Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy

Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses

Kristin Gjesdal, Kristin Gjesdal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317416326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Debates in Nineteenth-Century European & Philosophy offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters (organized around fifteen individual philosophers), the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of Nineteenth-Century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field.

Part I Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and the Kantian Legacy

Introduction

It would be no exaggeration to claim that the origins of what we typically characterize as nineteenth-century thought can be traced back to Immanuel Kant and his ambition, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), to bring the concerns of rationalism and British empiricism into a new, enlightenment program. Kant’s Critiques—in which he carries through his call for a Copernican turn in philosophy—present a number of challenges to which later philosophers, both in Kant’s own time and in the centuries to follow, were to respond. Thus, to the extent that we want to engage the central issues and concerns of European nineteenth-century thought, we need to acquire a basic grasp of the challenges presented by Kant and the Kantian aftermath. One such challenge concerns the nature and scope of human knowledge, as it is laid out in Kant’s first Critique.

Like much of his work within the field of German Idealism (including Die Grenzen der Vernunft [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991]), Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s chapter situates Kant within eighteenth-century German philosophy and shows how responses to Kant, including those of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, were profoundly influenced by the questions and criticisms that Kant was faced with from within his immediate intellectual circle. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Karl Leonard Reinhold (1757–1823), and Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) are all names that should be mentioned in this context. The problems these philosophers identified in Kant’s epistemology, Horstmann argues, came to shape the path of post-Kantian idealism. In his contribution, Paul Guyer, while sympathetic to Horstmann’s approach, sketches a Kantian response to Kant’s immediate critics and argues that such a response could challenge the standard understanding of later idealism and suggest, for instance, a close affinity between the perspective of Kant’s philosophy and that of Schelling (a topic that is further pursued in Dalia Nassar’s contribution to the Schelling part of this volume).

Further Reading

• Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Paul Guyer, Kant. 5Kant: Routledge, 2006.
• Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Chapter 1 The Reception of the Critique of Pure Reason in German Idealism

Rolf-Peter Horstmann

DOI: 10.4324/9781315686837-1

i Introduction: Reinhold, Jacobi, and Maimon

The reception of Kant’s first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, by the main members of the German idealistic movement—that is, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)—is a complex and complicated story that is intimately connected with the history of the controversies to which the first Critique gave rise.¹ Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was not an immediate philosophical success. On the contrary, in the first couple of years after its appearance in 1781, there was, much to Kant’s disappointment, little public reaction, and most of it was rather hostile, like the notorious review by Garve and Feder. This led Kant then to publish, in 1783, the Prolegomena, most of which he had already written down before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. 23:362ff.)² with the explicit hope of making his teachings more accessible (4:261, 263f.). Then, four years later (1787), and again reacting to what he thought to be misunderstandings about the foundations of his theoretical philosophy (cf. footnote to the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations, 4:447ff.), he published a second edition of the Critique in which considerable parts of the original work were rewritten.

Within the small community of those who contributed to the early discussion of the significance and the consequences of Kant’s critical philosophy, the most prominent became Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758–1823), and Salomon Maimon (1752–1800), who were also the most influential figures in the reception of the Critique of Pure Reason by German idealist philosophers. Whereas Reinhold established himself early on as the leading defender of Kant’s philosophical position, Jacobi was very soon recognized as its most outspoken critic. Maimon thought of himself as neither a Kantian nor a non-Kantian, but as a systematic philosopher in his own right who relied on elements of Kant’s philosophy in order to set up his own version of what he called, like Kant, “transcendental philosophy.” Because the German idealists read Kant’s philosophy, and especially the first Critique, against the background of its initial controversial assessment by Reinhold, Jacobi, and Maimon, it is necessary to provide a short outline of these early debates in order to come to an understanding of the German idealist assessment of the merits and shortcomings of Kant’s thought.

As early as 1786–7, Reinhold published a series of articles in a leading intellectual journal of the time, the Teutsche Merkur. He entitled the series the Letters on Kantian Philosophy (Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie). These letters, which were published in a modified form as a two-volume book in 1790 and 1792, were meant to demonstrate that the main doctrines of Kant’s philosophy are not in conflict with fundamental moral and religious convictions, but that, on the contrary, they give a sound and rational basis for shared ethical principles and belief in God. Kant was so pleased with Reinhold’s exposition of central elements of his teachings that at the end of his 1788 essay On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie), he publicly praised the discerning understanding of his position by Reinhold (cf. 8:183). This recognition by Kant made Reinhold an authority on Kant’s philosophy and led to the view that his reading of Kant’s writings had to be taken very seriously. But hardly more than a year after Kant’s public announcement, Reinhold gave up his role as interpreter of Kant’s position and began to present himself as a thinker who improves Kant’s theory, especially his theoretical philosophy. This was done in a book published in 1789 that Reinhold entitled An Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation (Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens) and that was dedicated to Kant among others. In the introductory essay to this book, entitled On the Fate of Kantian Philosophy up till Now (Über die bisherigen Schicksale der Kantischen Philosophie), Reinhold claimed that although Kant had given a correct and exhaustive theory of the faculty of knowledge (Erkenntnisvermögen) in his first Critique, he had not given an account of the principles that lie at the basis of his theory as its premises. Without stating these premises explicitly and without demonstrating them independently from the results of the Critique of Pure Reason, Reinhold argued, there can be no really convincing foundation for Kant’s endeavor. Thus, according to Reinhold, it is the task of philosophy after Kant to supply the premises for Kantian results. For methodological reasons, pursuing this task meant for Reinhold finding a first principle that is universally valid and self-evident from which to deduce Kantian epistemological claims. The principle he suggested, the so-called “principle of consciousness” (Satz des Bewusstseins), which relies on the concept of representation (Vorstellung), turned out to be rather controversial, and was considered to be untenable by influential critics such as G. E. Schulze, Maimon, and the young Fichte. Nevertheless, Reinhold’s central idea that philosophy has to be founded on a first principle that expresses an indubitable fact of consciousness was successful insofar as it gave rise to the impression that Kant’s theoretical philosophy was incomplete and thus in need of a new foundation.³

At almost the same time as the assumed Kantian Reinhold voiced suspicions about the lack of foundation in Kant’s theory, the unadulterated anti-Kantian Jacobi launched an attack on a central distinction that Kant draws in the first Critique, the distinction between things in themselves and appearances. Jacobi had set off the so-called pantheism controversy in 1785 with his On the Doctrine of Spinoza. In this book, he claimed that it is a mistake to think of reason and rationality as understood by modern philosophy as a privileged means for acquiring knowledge of the world and our situation in it. Instead, he claimed, one has to acknowledge that in the end, all knowledge rests on faith and revelation.⁴ For Jacobi, the most telling example of a philosophical project that claims to rely solely on reason and scientific rationality and that nevertheless fails badly in the attempt to gain knowledge is Kant’s theoretical philosophy. This is so, according to Jacobi, because Kant starts from assumptions that make no sense at all. Jacobi’s attack on Kant’s theory of knowledge is documented impressively in his 1787 book David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus), especially in the appendix to this book entitled On Transcendental Idealism (Über den transzendentalen Idealismus). Jacobi’s main line of criticism here is roughly as follows. For Kant, knowledge is the joint product of the faculties of sensibility and understanding, where sensibility provides the data by being affected through something or other, and the understanding is in charge of the ordering of these data into the representation of an object by subjecting these data to conceptual rules. Now, if with Kant we call the source of the affection of our sensibility “thing in itself,” and if we name what can be known by us as an object an “appearance,” then, according to Jacobi, Kant faces a dilemma: on the one hand, he has to claim that we cannot know anything about what affects our sensibility—that is, about the thing in itself—because what can be known by us as an object has to be conceptually constituted; on the other hand, he has to acknowledge that we know at least something about the thing in itself—namely, that it is the source of affection. This knowledge seems to imply that the thing in itself somehow is an object of knowledge, which in turn seems to imply that it is an appearance. Thus the distinction between appearances and things in themselves either turns out to be no distinction at all or, if there is a distinction between them, then one cannot say anything about their relation to us, not even that things in themselves are the source of affection. Jacobi famously expresses this dilemma in the following words: “without” the presupposition of things in themselves “I could not enter into the system, but with it I could not stay within it.”⁵ Whether this criticism of Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves is justified or not has itself become a topic of controversy that is still going on and that cannot be discussed here. For the assessment of the validity of Kant’s philosophy by his contemporaries, this criticism had far-reaching consequences, giving rise to worries that at the very basis of Kant’s doctrine there might be tensions between its central and constitutive elements, tensions that cannot be overcome by means of the resources from within the Kantian framework.⁶ In the eyes of Kant’s contemporaries, these worries, although initiated by the problems connected with the distinction between appearances and things in themselves raised by Jacobi, were not restricted to this distinction, but were raised against other distinctions of Kant’s philosophy as well—for example, against the distinction between concepts and intuitions and between a sensible world and an intelligible world. The aim of avoiding these so-called dualisms led most of the post-Kantian idealists to favor anti-dualistic or monistic models of reality.

Concerns from Reinhold about the absence of foundations and worries from Jacobi about irreconcilable dualisms were not the only motives that determined the reception of Kant’s philosophy by the German idealists. A third important motive was provided by the suspicion articulated most forcefully by Maimon (and later in a different way by G. E. Schulze) that in the end, Kant’s critical epistemology cannot refute skepticism with regard to the external world. Maimon made a lasting impression on some of his contemporaries with a book published in 1790 under the title Essay in Transcendental Philosophy (Versuch über Transzendentalphilosophie). Even Kant, although he was ultimately somewhat ambivalent with respect to its merits—for rather opposite assessments by Kant one may compare his letter to Marcus Herz from May 26, 1789 (11:48ff.) and his letter to Reinhold from March 28, 1794 (11:475f.)—paid close attention to it. Among the many topics Maimon pursues in this book, his main point concerning Kant seems to be that although Kant succeeded in giving a convincing account of the conditions of the possibility of experience, he failed to show that there are experiences, or that experiences are real. This is so, according to Maimon, because by means of Kant’s theory of space, time, and the categories, one is not in a position to determine an actual experience. For Maimon, this means that Kant just presupposes the fact of experience as organized according to the forms of sensibility and the categories and hence cannot refute the skeptic who doubts that there are any experiences. Although in his Essay, Maimon criticized Kant’s theoretical philosophy with respect to quite a number of different points, it was mainly the charge that Kant was unable to refute the skeptic that became connected with Maimon’s name.⁷

It is against this background of a growing awareness that there might be limitations and shortcomings in the way in which Kant realized his epistemological project that the German idealists started to read the first Critique. For them, the situation with respect to Kant’s philosophy was further complicated by the fact that their doubts concerning the well-foundedness of Kant’s doctrine induced by critics such as Reinhold, Jacobi, and Maimon were at odds with their belief in the overall superiority of Kant’s teachings. This belief was rooted in their conviction that Kant’s philosophy had been successful in overcoming the divide between rationalism and empiricism by insisting on a priori conditions of the empirical and on the fundamental role of self-consciousness in constituting the unity of experience in all its different forms as theoretical, practical, and aesthetic experience. This conflict between their doubts and their belief gave rise to an ambivalent attitude toward Kant’s philosophy: on the one hand, they wanted to save what they called the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy, by which they meant those elements that in their eyes made Kant superior over the modern philosophical tradition; on the other hand, they were forced to acknowledge that what they called the “letter” of Kant’s philosophy, which meant the way in which he presented his teachings, was to some extent deficient.

ii Fichte

This ambivalent attitude can be seen clearly in Fichte’s assessment of Kant’s first Critique. [ . . . ] Fichte became acquainted with Kant’s philosophy early in his intellectual development, even before he started his academic career. As early as 1790, he made notes on the Transcendental Logic of the Critique of Pure Reason and prepared an excerpt with comments from the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Versuch eines erklärenden Auszugs aus Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft). However, what made him a devoted Kantian was neither the first nor the third Critique but the second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. He emphatically expressed the deep impression the second Critique made on him in a letter written in late summer of 1790.⁸ Thus, from the beginning, he became interested in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, not for its own sake, but because an assessment of its results was necessary in order to accept the practical side of Kant’s philosophy. Because...