The Longman Standard History of 19th Century Philosophy

Daniel Kolak,Garrett Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000150247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts

With selections of philosophers from Fichte to Dewey, this new anthology provides significant learning support and historical context for the readings along with a wide variety of pedagogical assists.Biographical headnotes, reading introductions, study questions, and specialPrologues andPhilosophical Overviews help students understand and appreciate the philosophical concepts under discussion.Philosophical Bridges discuss how the work of earlier thinkers would influence philosophers to come, and place major movements in a contemporary context, showing students how the schools of philosophy interrelate and how various philosophies apply to the world today.In addition to this volume of 19th Century Philosophy, a comprehensive survey of the whole of Western philosophical history, and other individual volumes for each of the major historical eras are also available for specialized courses.

SECTION II
THE GERMAN IDEALISTS

PROLOGUE

The remarkable blooming of philosophy in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century—especially the four decades from 1780 to 1820—has been rightly compared to the golden age of philosophy in Greece, from Socrates to Aristotle. This happened in tandem with new and profound developments in literature and art nurtured by geniuses among which Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, were among the most illustrious.

The advent of Kantian philosophy rooted in the previous century provided much of the impetus, even and especially those who reacted against it. Indeed, it was the sudden departure from one central tenet of Kant’s system that characterized the first aspect of the sudden new revolution in thought and led to a resurgence of grand new systems of idealism. This was the abandonment of the concept of the thing-in-itself that began with Johann Fichte (1762–1814). Kant immediately recognized Fichte as a great new thinker and helped launch his career. Fichte’s fruitful advance from the Kantian philosophy paved the way for three important subsequent developments: absolute idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism. What enabled him to do this was his brilliant analysis of the real and primary function of the ego as a self-affirming primitive act of consciousness that constructs the objective world, not in accordance with, or based as a reaction to things-in-themselves, but purely from its own appearances. In this way Fichte paved the way for Schelling and Hegel. Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) formed on the basis of such thinking his system of objective idealism, which so influenced his colleague and younger friend Hegel, and the Romanticism that inspired so much of subsequent thought, especially in development of literature and the arts. His System of Transcendental Idealism lays out his “philosophy of identity,” in which the objective and subjective are unified under one systematic philosophy of nature, epistemology, and ethics.

FICHTE (1762–1814)

Biographical History

The son of a farmer and linen-maker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in the village of Rammenau in Upper (Saxon) Lusatia. After completing his studies in philosophy at the Universities of Jena and Leipzig he got a job tutoring students in Zurich. He published his first book at the age of 28, called Aphorisms on Religion and God (1790); it was inspired in part by Spinoza and even more so by Kant, who read it and invited him to Konigsberg. Fichte showed Kant the manuscript for his next work, Essay Toward a Critique of All Revelation. This work so impressed Kant that he sent it to his publisher on Fichte’s behalf along with a Preface authored by Kant himself. The book came out two years later, in 1792, but because of a printer’s error Fichte’s name did not appear in the book and with the Preface by Kant everyone assumed that Kant was the author. By then it had already attracted much attention. Kant published a correction, stating clearly that the book was not by him but by Fichte and, moreover, that it happens to solve a major problem with Kant’s own system that Kant himself had found impossible to solve! Overnight, Fichte became a legendary figure.

By the end of his life Fichte was generally acknowledged as one of the three leading successors to the great Immanuel Kant, along with Hegel and Schelling (see the sections following). At the University of Jena, where he had a full professorship, he commanded a huge following among the students and the public who attended his dynamic, standing-room-only lectures. However, jealousies from among his less popular colleagues led to a fight with the administration over academic freedom; against the students and the public’s protest, Fichte was dismissed from his position for his “highly dangerous” views. In addition, he was ordered not to publish! Fichte steadfastly refused, stating that a philosopher’s moral duty was to express his thoughts to all who would listen, including and especially his views about (and against) religion. After being dismissed from his post Fichte continued to give public lectures that were even more highly attended than before, and he continued to publish his works. In 1807, shortly after the French occupation, Fichte gave a famous speech, Addresses to the German Nation. Inspired by his call to moral regeneration through national unity and political reform, he commanded a wide political following that helped him to achieve, four years later, one of his ambitions: the founding of the new University of Berlin. There he remained for the rest of his life, teaching and writing.

Philosophical Overview

Kant’s problem with his own philosophy, as he saw it, was this: His famous Critique of Pure Reason, arguably one of the greatest works of philosophy ever, calls all speculative theology into question and puts religion in a negative light. His Critique of Practical Reason, however, puts the central idea of Kant’s philosophy, the moral law, at the center of any religion. This Kant saw as an inconsistency in his own position and a defect of his work. The problem, in a nutshell, is that this inconsistency in Kant’s thought leaves open the question of under what conditions, if any, authentic religious belief is possible. Fichte answers this question. His Critique of All Revelation bridges the gap between Kant’s two monumental works. In it, Fichte argues that the absolute requirements of the moral law themselves supply the necessary conditions that make revealed religion possible, a Kantian argument that even the great Kant could not see how to make.

In his other works Fichte departs from Kant and the Kantian approach to philosophy in specific ways that opened the door to subsequent improvements and developments, indeed, paved the way for the subsequent movements known as absolute idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism. Moreover, Fichte’s astute analysis of the ego as the self-affirming primitive act of consciousness that constructs not only the objects of perception but the entire objective world, departs from Kant in the following dynamic way. Instead of constructing its objects in tandem with noumena, “things-in-themselves” (ding-an-sich), the ego constructs objects solely out of its own appearances.

THE SCIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

Fichte

The work begins with an antinomy-like conflict between the inner sense of free will and the external sense that the world is completely determined. As he puts it, “In immediate consciousness, I appear to myself as free; by reflection on the whole of Nature, I discover that freedom is absolutely impossible.” Add then to this dynamic equation the notion the only immediate knowledge of which we are capable is that of our own mind: “In all perception you perceive your own state.” What you get is the sum and substance of Fichte’s conclusions and the beginning of the departure, in the nineteenth century, from Kant, namely, the notion that the idea of things in themselves, the noumena, the ding-an-sich, are themselves but projections of the mind and, therefore, not something to which the consciousness mind is bound. Though it appears to be! This insight also opens the door to subsequent developments in philosophy that would come to be known as existentialism, predicated on the notion that the boundary by which we ordinarily distinguish self from other on the basis of what we can control apparently by a conscious act of will and what we cannot, is even if necessary for the having of experience, as Kant thought, an inauthentic way for the mind to relate to itself and the world.

What, then, is reality according to Fichte? What it means for something, anything, to be real—take, for instance, the chair on which you sit—is that it consists of all possible experiences that the object as such can generate within the mind of a potential observer. Take the chair apart, look at it from every angle, hit it, use it in various ways, the fact is that the reason you can perform any such acts with the chair is that the chair is a containing space of all possibilities of the object in relation to the perceiving subject. The universe itself according to Fichte is an Absolute Idea, animated by an act of consciousness which then unfolds one state into the next.

1.

Attend to yourself; turn your glance away from all that surrounds you and upon your own innermost self. Such is the first demand which philosophy makes of its disciples. We speak of nothing that is without you, but wholly of yourself.

In the most fleeting self-observation every one must perceive a marked difference between the var ious immediate determinations of his consciousness, which we may also call representations. Some of them appear entirely dependent upon our freedom, and it is impossible for us to believe that there is anything without us corresponding to them. Our imagination, our will, appears to us as free. Others, however, we refer to a truth, as their model, which is held to be established, independent of us; and in the attempt to determine such representations, we find ourselves conditioned by the necessity of their harmony with this truth. In the knowledge of their contents we do not consider ourselves free. In brief, we can say, some of our representations are accompanied by the feeling of freedom, others by the feeling of necessity.

The question cannot reasonably arise: why are the representations, which are directly dependent upon our freedom, determined in precisely this manner and not otherwise? For when it is affirmed that they are dependent upon our freedom, all application of the conception of a ground is dismissed; they are thus, because I have so determined them, and if I had determined them otherwise, then they would be different. But it is certainly a question worthy of reflection: what is the ground of the system of those representations which are accompanied by the feelings of necessity and of that feeling of necessity itself? To answer this question is the task of philosophy; and, in my opinion, nothing is philosophy but the science which solves this problem. The system of those representations which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity is also called experience: internal as well as external experience. Philosophy has therefore—to express the same thing in other words—to discover the ground of all experience.

Only three distinct objections can be raised against what has here been stated. Someone might deny that representations, accompanied by the feeling of necessity, and referred to a truth determined without our aid, are ever present in our consciousness. Such a person would either make the denial against better knowledge or be differently constituted from other men. In the latter case there would also be nothing for him that he denied, and hence no denial. We could therefore dismiss his protest without further ceremony. Or someone might say: the question raised is entirely unanswerable, we are and must remain in insuperable ignorance concerning it. To enter upon an argument with such a person is wholly superfluous. He is best refuted by an actual answer to the question; then all he can do is to test our attempt and to state where and why it appears to him insufficient. Finally, some one might dispute about the designation, and assert: philosophy is something else, or at least something more, than what you have above stated. It might easily be proved to such a one, that scholars have at all times regarded exactly what has here been stated, to be philosophy, and that whatever else he might set up for it has already another name; that if this word is to signify anything at all, it must mean precisely this particular science.

Since, however, we are unwilling to enter upon any unfruitful controversy about words, we have on our part already abandoned the name of philosophy, and have called the science which has, properly speaking, the solution of the problem here indicated for its object, the Science of Knowledge.

2.

Only when speaking of something regarded as accidental, that is, which we suppose might also have been otherwise, though it was not determined by freedom, can we inquire concerning a ground. And precisely because of this asking concerning its ground does it become accidental to the inquirer. The problem involved in seeking the ground of anything means to find something else, from the special nature of which it can be seen why the accidental, among the manifold determinations which might have come to it, assumed precisely the one it did. The ground lies, by virtue of the mere thought of a ground, outside of that which is grounded; and both are, in so far as they are the ground and the grounded, opposed to each other, related to each other, and thus the latter is explained from the former.

Now philosophy seeks to discover the ground of all experience; hence its object lies necessarily beyond all experience. This proposition applies to all philosophy, and has also actually been so applied, down to the period of the Kantians and their facts of consciousness, that is, of inner experience.

No objection can be raised against the proposition here set forth; for the premise to our conclusion is a mere analysis of the above-stated conception of philosophy and from it the conclusion is drawn. If someone possibly should remind us that the conception of a ground must be differently explained, we certainly could not prevent him from forming another conception of it if he chooses; but we affirm with equal right, that in the above description of philosophy we wish nothing else to be understood by that word but what has been stated. Hence, if this meaning is not permitted, the possibility of philosophy, as we have described it, must be altogether denied; and to such a denial we have already made reply in our first section.

3.

The finite intelligence has nothing outside of experience. This it is that yields the entire material of its thinking. The philosopher is subject necessarily to similar conditions, and hence it appears inconceivable how he can raise himself above experience.

But he can abstract; that is to say, he can separate by the freedom of thinking what is united in experience. In experience, the thing, or, that which is to be determined independently of our freedom and in accordance with which our knowledge is to shape itself, and the intelligence, or that which is to acquire a knowledge of it, are inseparably united. The philosopher may abstract from both, and if he does, he has abstracted from experience and lifted himself above it. If he abstracts from the first, he retains an intelligence in itself, that is, abstracted from its relation to experience; if he abstracts from the latter, he retains the thing in itself, that is, abstracted from the fact that it occurs in experience. He thus retains either the intelligence in itself, or the thing-in-itself, as the ground of explanation of experience. The former mode of procedure is called idealism, the latter dogmatism.

Only these two philosophical systems (and of that these remarks should convince everybody) are possible. According to the first system, the representations which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity are products of the intelligence, which must be presupposed in their explanation; according to the latter system they are products of a thing in itself, which must be presupposed to explain them. If anyone desired to dispute this position, he would have to prove either that there is still another way to transcend experience than by means of abstraction, or that there exist in the consciousness of experience more than the two components just mentioned. Now, in regard to the first, it will appear below that what we have here called intelligence is actually present under another name in consciousness, and therefore is not something entirely produced by abstraction; but it will at the same time be shown that the consciousness of it is conditioned by an abstraction, which is wholly natural to mankind.

It will not be denied that it is possible to frame an entire system from fragments of these dissimilar systems, and that this illogical labor has actually very often been undertaken; but it is denied that more than these two systems are possible in any logical mode of procedure.

4.

Between the object (we shall call the explanatory ground of experience affirmed by a philosophy the object of that philosophy, since it appears to be only through and for such philosophy) of idealism and that of dogmatism there is a remarkable distinction in reference to their relation to consciousness. Everything of which I am conscious is called object of consciousness. There are three ways in which the object can be related to consciousness. Either the object appears to have been produced by the representation, or as existing without its aid; and in the latter case, ei...