The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy

Dean Moyar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415404501
• eBook ISBN: 9781135151102
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The nineteenth century is a period of stunning philosophical originality, characterised by radical engagement with the emerging human sciences. Often overshadowed by twentieth century philosophy which sought to reject some of its central tenets, the philosophers of the nineteenth century have re-emerged as profoundly important figures.

The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy

is an outstanding survey and assessment of the century as a whole. Divided into seven parts and including thirty chapters written by leading international scholars, the Companion examines and assesses the central topics, themes, and philosophers of the nineteenth century, presenting the first comprehensive picture of the period in a single volume:

• German Idealism
• philosophy as political action, including young Hegelians, Marx and Tocqueville
• philosophy and subjectivity, including Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
• scientific naturalism, including Darwinism, philosophy of race, experimental psychology and Neo-Kantianism
• utilitarianism and British Idealism
• American Idealism and Pragmatism
• new directions in Mind and Logic, including Brentano, Frege and Husserl.

The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy

is essential reading for students of philosophy, and for anyone interested in this period in related disciplines such as politics, history, literature and religion.

Part I GERMAN IDEALISM

DOI: 10.4324/9780203856581-2

1 Self-Consciousness, System, Dialectic

Scott Jenkins

DOI: 10.4324/9780203856581-3

The problems that would shape early nineteenth-century European philosophy arose out of Immanuel Kant’s realization, early in 1772, that his conception of metaphysics rested upon a problematic assumption. Two years earlier, upon his appointment to the chair of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg, he had outlined his central philosophical views in his Inaugural Dissertation in which he distinguished between sensible knowledge and knowledge possible through pure thought, which he believed to be capable of disclosing the fundamental features of things and relations that are not themselves present to the senses. Like his rationalist predecessors, such as Leibniz and Wolff, Kant took for granted that we are capable of producing such a metaphysics. When he realized that this assumption stood in need of justification, the trajectory of modern European thought underwent a fundamental change. The Critique of Pure Reason was Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that metaphysics is in fact possible. The work both introduced a new philosophical methodology and generated a radically new theory of knowledge and its limitations. The Idealist philosophers who followed Kant, figures such as Karl Reinhold, J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel, all regarded the Critique as the starting point of philosophical activity. But while some saw the completion of Kant’s project as the central task of philosophy, others saw in Kant’s critical philosophy errors and ungrounded assumptions so significant that the method of the Critique had to be abandoned.

In this chapter, I begin with the emergence of Kant’s new philosophical method in order to provide a context for the Idealist innovations that followed. I then consider, in part two, the work of Reinhold and Fichte, who regarded themselves as adhering to the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy while changing its central terms. In their work on the central Kantian notions of representation and self-consciousness, respectively, Reinhold and Fichte aim to provide a firm foundation for the claims of the first Critique. This project leads them to introduce into European thought radically new methodological ideals, such as systematicity in relation to a first principle of philosophy, which give rise to new methods of doing philosophy, such as phenomenological description. The work of Reinhold and Fichte also had a significant effect upon Hegel, and in the third part I consider how Hegel’s rejection of the methodological assumptions of his predecessors can be seen as a development of the same basic concern about the possibility of metaphysics that led to Kant’s Critique, twenty-five years earlier. In order to account for Hegel’s turn to a new, dialectical method in philosophy, I consider in part three how his most innovative work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, can function as an argument for the claim that pure reason is not limited in its scope.

Kant's critical thought

In a letter to his friend Marcus Herz dated 21 February 1772, Kant states that his plan to produce a book to be entitled “The Limits of Sense and Reason” has been frustrated by the discovery that he, like all metaphysicians before him, had overlooked an essential problem of metaphysics. This problem, he says, can be summed up in the question, “What is the ground of the relation of that in us we call ‘representation’ to the object?” (Kant 1999: 133).¹ Kant notes that in some cases this question appears easy to answer. In perception, for example, there exists a causal relation between a subject’s representation of an object and that object itself. The passive subject is affected by an object, resulting in a particular modification of the mind, one characteristic of subjects and objects of those particular kinds. Thus the product of this affection counts as a representation of the object, Kant asserts, due to the regular causal relation between objects of sensibility and the sensory capacities of the subject. We can also conceive of a relation of representation grounded in a causal relation in which the subject is causally active. God, for example, does not need to be affected by objects in order to have cognition of those objects. As an archetypal intellect, God’s cognitions are immediately reality. Such a capacity does not exist in finite beings, however, and except in the case of agency our cognitions do not serve as archetypes for reality.

In light of these considerations, it would appear that sensory affection is the only ground of a relation of representation for finite subjects such as ourselves. Such a result would yield a generally empiricist account of mental content, according to which our thoughts relate exclusively to entities that can be presented to us in sensory experience. Kant was troubled by this result since he, like his rationalist predecessors, had taken for granted relations of representation that are not compatible with such an understanding of representational content. The objects of traditional metaphysical discourse, such as God and the soul, are not possible objects of sensory experience. Accordingly, if no ground of a relation of representation can be produced in the case of those mental entities Kant had previously termed “intellectual representations,” then it is not at all clear that we have a right to regard those mental entities as contentful representations. They would, instead, be mere subjective determinations of the mind, and claims in which they appear would be lacking not just in empirical evidence, but in cognitive content.

Looking back on this period of thought, Kant in 1783 characterized himself as operating within a “dogmatic slumber” from which he awoke only with the assistance of David Hume’s investigations into our notion of cause (Kant 1997b: 10). It was Hume, of course, who argued that the notion of a necessary connection between events has its origin in the subjective faculty of imagination. On his view, the human mind constructs the notion of a necessary connection between events only once we have observed the constant conjunction in space and time of events of particular kinds and come to anticipate that this regularity will continue in the future. The subjective ground of this feeling of anticipation, which Hume terms “custom,” is thus the source of our tendency to expect that a stationary billiard ball, for example, will begin to roll across the table once it is struck by another billiard ball. Without such a subjective ground, we would not possess the notion of a necessary connection between objects. On this analysis, it is not at all clear what right we have to claim that there exist causal relations between objects. The notion of cause has its origin in a subjective mental tendency and seems to be nothing more than a way in which we are constrained to think of objects.

Kant’s realization that he had been operating within a dogmatic slumber receives its first expression in the letter to Herz. There he states of the pure concepts of the understanding (by which he understands those concepts that do not arise from a sensible affection) “if such intellectual representations depend on our inner activity, whence comes the agreement that they are supposed to have with objects – objects that are nevertheless not possibly produced thereby?” (Kant 1999: 133). This question, he notes, was answered in a “merely negative way” in the Inaugural Dissertation, where he stated that intellectual representations are not the product of a sensible affection – they are instead “given in a fundamental fashion by the pure understanding itself” (Kant 1992: 406). But this answer of course fails to address the question of our right to assert that representations that are not products of sensible affection nevertheless relate to objects and can figure in contentful thought about those objects. As a result, a skepticism concerning the relation between our minds and the world threatens. While our distinctively metaphysical reflections might appear to make progress in elucidating the basic structure of existence, it appears that we have no right to assert that the basic concepts and axioms of that metaphysics are in fact contentful.

Kant’s own scepticism did not last long, and in the letter to Herz he states that he has already succeeded in demonstrating that there exist mental entities that originate in the mind independent of any particular affection but nevertheless refer to objects. The demonstration of this result, he announced, would appear in the theoretical part of a work to be entitled the “Critique of Pure Reason.” Its subject matter would, accordingly, be “the sources of metaphysics, its methods and limits” (Kant 1999: 135). Confident in his solution to the problem he had discovered, Kant states that he expects to publish his results in just three months. It would be nine years, however, until the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason would appear in print. This so-called “decade of silence” was a result of the magnitude, and innovative nature, of Kant’s task.

The method of Kant's Critique

In order to motivate the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant begins his work with a preface to the reader designed to make clear the need for a consideration of the issues discussed in the letter to Herz. The question of the ground of the relation of a representation to its object – which in fact does not make an appearance in the Critique until the end of the Introduction to the work, and then only implicitly – is cast as the key to making progress in a self-examination of reason itself. And this self-examination, Kant thinks, is required by the sorry state of metaphysics in his time. While rationalists and empiricists continually disagree concerning the nature and limits of knowledge, no progress is made in resolving these disputes. Rationalists continue to employ metaphysical principles such as the principle of sufficient reason, empiricists deny the legitimacy of such principles, and philosophy continually falls short of its goal of generating a secure doctrine of knowledge. Consequently, Kant proposes to examine the faculty of reason as a means to resolving these endless disputes.

But how does one carry out such a critique of reason itself? While Kant has a compelling answer to this question, one that shaped the trajectory of philosophy through the nineteenth century, that answer is obscured, in part, by Kant’s own attempts to make clear the revolutionary nature of his work. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant likens his investigation to that of Copernicus, whose heliocentrism finally put the science of astronomy on a stable footing.

We must … make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. (Bxvi)

There are at least three potential problems with Kant’s analogy. First, Kant appears to be getting Copernicus exactly wrong. While Copernicus made progress in astronomy by assuming that Earth does not stand at the center of the universe, Kant’s suggestion that we take up the hypothesis that objects conform to our knowledge seems to involve the opposite relation; it seems to put us at the center of the epistemological universe. A second, related worry concerns Kant’s employment of the notion of knowledge, or cognition. Since our common understanding of knowledge involves the idea that something within us (a belief, image, etc.) corresponds to reality by conforming to reality, Kant’s talk of an object conforming to our faculties of representation can sound like a perversion of that concept of knowledge. We tend to think that the world is the way it is, regardless of what we think of it, and that an inner state counts as a state of knowledge by matching up with the way the world is. Finally, Kant’s presentation of his “Copernican revolution” should give one pause. The claim that objects conform to our representational capacities (and not the other way around) appears to be a mere assertion lacking any grounding. We might wonder, then, why we ought to employ just this assumption as a fundamental principle of metaphysics.

Kant has a response to all three worries, though as we will see, the third of these will reappear in various forms in the work of his successors. Taking them in order, Kant’s understanding of Copernicus can be defended by considering the geocentric framework that Copernicus abandoned. On this view, the observed motion of celestial bodies is to be explained exclusively through appeal to their actual motion relative to the stationary Earth. A heliocentric model of the universe, on the other hand, requires that the observed motion of celestial bodies be explained, in part, through appeal to the Earth’s revolution around the sun. Similarly, Kant’s understanding of cognition requires that we abandon the assumption that the observed properties of objects are to be explained exclusively through appeal to properties that they possess in themselves. His new ‘heliocentric’ model of cognition explains our experience of objects in part through appeal to an activity of the subject, making the analogy with Copernicus’ innovation rather apt.

The second worry concerning Kant’s Copernican analogy – that Kant has perverted our concept of knowledge – involves a misunderstanding of Kant’s notion of knowledge, or cognition (as some translators render the German “Erkenntnis”). If Kant were claiming that knowledge is a matter of the world conforming to whatever we happen to believe, he would indeed be employing a bizarre notion of knowledge. The claim is, rather, that the world, somehow, conforms to our cognitive capacities. Whether any empirical particular belief is true is always, Kant thinks, dependent upon the state of the world.

The final worry to consider concerns Kant’s right to his new Copernican framework. Even if such a framework does make possible the distinctively metaphysical claims that Kant aims to establish, the question remains, Why should we assume that objects do conform to our representational capacities? We cannot, after all, judge the legitimacy of Kant’s understanding of cognition through appeal to its epistemological consequences. In response, Kant would assert that his new, Copernican standpoint is both supported by independent argument and a part of a venerable philosophical tradition. In the first edition of the Critique, Kant praises the “celebrated Locke” who attempted a “physiology of the human understanding” designed to determine the scope of our knowledge (Aix). Convinced that it was a mistake to “let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being” before we were assured that our understanding was suited to such inquiries, Locke proceeded to examine our capacities for understanding themselves (Locke 1959: 31). Similarly, Kant’s goal in the Critique is to determine the legitimate domain of reason by considering the way in which the mind operates. His examination of our cognitive capacities is meant to establish that objects do in fact conform to those capacities, a conclusion that would both make possible distinctively metaphysical claims – claims that are both synthetic and a priori – and show the limits of metaphysics.

Kant terms this kind of knowledge of our cognitive faculties “transcendental” – a term he defines in the first edition of the Critique as follows: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our a priori concepts of objects in general” (A11). This definition is not immediately trans...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I German Idealism
• Part II Philosophy as political action
• Part III Rethinking the subject
• Part IV Engaging naturalism
• Part V Utilitarianism and British Idealism
• Part VI American pragmatism and idealism
• Part VII New directions in philosophy of mind and logic
• Index