8 See Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 109 and note 10, p. 109.
9 Anglophone scholars on the whole have taken Fichte to have invented the word, Tathandlung, for his own purposes to distinguish it from a normal fact, a Tatsache. Paul Franks shows that Tathandlung is in fact an older word, and it is Tatsache that was relatively new at Fichte’s time. See Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. The mistake Franks locates is, alas, repeated in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10 Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958), Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
11 On the idea of an ultimate duality of starting points, see Rosenberg, J. F. (1993), “Raiders of the Lost Distinction: Richard Rorty and the Search for the Last Dichotomy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53(1), pp. 195–214.
12 As Heine summed up that reaction: “The ladies asked: Doesn’t he even believe in the existence of his wife? No? And Madame Fichte puts up with this?” (Heine, H., T. P. Pinkard, et al. (2007), On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
13 The cite comes from the second (1787) edition of Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan: “The principle of apperception is the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge.” (§16), and in the footnote to that, “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy. Indeed this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself.”
14 The story of this debate may be found in various forms. See Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press; Beiser, F. C. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. For the earlier reception of Spinoza’s work, see Israel, J. I. (2001), Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
15 Kant, I. and W. S. Pluhar (1987), Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., §§57, 59.
16 See the account in Kosch, M. (2006), Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
17 “The whole from which the Naturphilosophie issues is absolute idealism. The Naturphilosophie does not take precedence over idealism, nor is it in any way opposed to it so far as it is absolute, but certainly is opposed, so far as it is relative idealism, and accordingly grasps only the one side of the absolute act of cognition, which, without the other, is unthinkable.” (Schelling, F. W. J. v. (1988), Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1797). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.)
18 Here is Schelling’s own summary of the process: “If the secret of nature consists in the fact that she maintains opposed forces in equilibrium or in lasting, forever undecided, strife, then the same forces, as soon as one of them acquires a lasting pre-dominance, must destroy what they were maintaining in the previous state.” (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1797), p. 57).
19 For what it is worth, this modifies the presentation of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie given in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20 See Richards, R. J. (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
21 This project is carried out in Schelling, F. W. J. v. and P. L. Heath (1978), System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
22 Hegel complained later in his lectures on the history of philosophy about Schelling’s procedure: “Wird aber mit der intellektuellen Anschauung angefangen, so ist das Assertion, Orakel, das man sich gefallen lassen soll, weil die Forderung gemacht ist, daß man intellektuell anschaue.” (English: : “If one begins with intellectual intuition, then all one has is assertion, the oracle in which one is supposed to acquiesce, since the demand is made that one intuit intellectually.”) (Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 435.) In his Encyclopedia, he complained without naming Schelling that: “Wenn es dem Bewußtsein nicht saurer gemacht würde, die Wahrheit zu erkennen, sondern man sich nur auf den Dreifuß zu setzen und Orakel zu sprechen brauchte, so wäre freilich die Arbeit des Denkens gespart.” (English: “When knowing the truth is not supposed to be so hard for consciousness – but rather one only needs to sit in one’s armchair and speak oracularly – then one is of course spared the labor of thinking.”) (Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 18.)
23 For a more detailed story of Hegel’s development, see Pinkard, T. P. (2000), Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24 “Es sind im allgemeinen diese beiden Gänge sehr bestimmt ausgedrückt. Eine Seite ist dabei diese Durchführung der Natur zum Subjekt, die andere die des Ichs zum Objekt. Die wahre Durchführung aber könnte nur auf logische Weise geschehen; denn diese enthält den reinen Gedanken. Aber die logische Betrachtung ist das, wozu Schelling in seiner Darstellung, Entwicklung nicht gekommen ist. Der wahrhafte Beweis, daß diese Identität das Wahrhafte ist, könnte vielmehr nur so geführt werden, daß jedes für sich untersucht wird in seinen logischen Bestimmungen, d. h. in seinen wesentlichen Bestimmungen; woran sich sodann ergeben müßte, daß das Subjektive dies ist, sich zu verwandeln in Objektives, und das Objektive dies ist, nicht so zu bleiben, sondern sich subjektiv zu machen. Man müßte am Endlichen selbst aufzeigen, daß es den Widerspruch in sich enthielte und sich zum Unendlichen machte; so hätten wir also die Einheit des Endlichen und Unendlichen.” (English: “One side [of Schelling’s views] develops nature all the way up to the subject, and the other develops the “I” all the way up to the object. However, [Schelling’s program] could really only be carried out in a logical manner, for the latter contains pure thoughts; it is the logical approach that Schelling never achieves in the exposition of his views and in his own development. The genuine demonstration that this identity is the genuine identity would rather have to be carried out such that each side would be investigated with regard to its logical determinations. It would then have to turn out that the subjective is what transforms itself into the objective, and that the objective does not remain objective but makes itself into the subjective. One has to show that the finite itself contains the contradiction within itself and makes itself into the infinite. In that way, we would have the unity of the finite and the infinite.”)
(Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp., p. 435.)
25 See Beiser, F. C. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Beiser, F. C. (2005), Hegel. New York and London: Routledge. Beiser says that:
There is not a single Hegelian theme that cannot be traced back to his predecessors in Jena, to many earlier thinkers whom Hegel and the Hegelian school either belittled or ignored…[Hegel] was a tortoise among hares; and, when all the hares had squandered or consumed their energies, he alone trudged, slowly but surely, over the finish line. Like all victors, he then rewrote history from his point of view, as the tale of his own triump
h.
(Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 9–10).
Beiser also claims that the Naturphilosophie “is the rational core rather than the mystical shell of Schelling’s and Hegel’s absolute idealism.” (Beiser, German Idealism, p. 509.) How close Hegel’s philosophy was to Schelling’s was, not surprisingly, the subject of great debate in Hegel’s own day. The early reviews of the Phenomenology contended with each other on whether Hegel had made a break with Schelling or was continuing on the same path. Beiser seems to take up the view voiced by J. F. Fries at the time that Hegel’s system is only “Schelling’s Naturphilosophie carried out on the side of spirit.” (Nicolin, G. (1970), Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen. Hamburg: F. Meiner, #132, p. 87.) Beiser’s view also echoes Schelling’s repeated complaints later in his life to anyone who would listen that Hegel had only stolen his ideas, and that Hegel’s system differed from his own only in the way one might transpose a violin concerto for the piano. See the discussion of the reception of the Phenomenology in Hegel’s own time in Pinkard, T. P. (2000), Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 256–65.
26 For an informed and subtle defense of the idea that Hegel remained a Schellingian, see Bowman, B. (2013), Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
27 See Pippin, R. B. (2005), “Concept and Intuition: On Distinguishability and Separability,” Hegel-Studien 40. In that essay, Pippin argues that those who think that Hegel failed to distinguish concepts from intuitions simply have not read the texts carefully enough and have failed to make the distinction between “separability” and “distinction.” Concepts and intuitions are distinct for Hegel, but they are not separable. This also forms one of the core arguments of Pippin, R. B. (1989), Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The distinction between concept and intuition and their non-separability is also the focus of Sedgwick, S. S. (2012), Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
28 In his letter to Hegel about the Phenomenology in 1807, Schelling himself noted that concept and intuition were both just aspects of “what you and I have called the Idea—which by its very nature is concept in one of its aspects and intuition in another.” (Hegel, G. W. F. and J. Hoffmeister (1961), Briefe von und an Hegel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, I, #107; Hegel, G. W. F. and C. Butler, et al. (1984), Hegel: The Letters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 80.) Hegel could have accepted that formulation, but he did not understand the unity of concept and intuition in the same way as Schelling did.
29 Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §246. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. London and New York: Allen & Unwin and Humanities Press, p. 9: “There is a metaphysics which is all the rage in our time, which holds that we cannot know things because they are completely closed off to us. One could put it this way: Not even the animals are as stupid as these metaphysicians, for they go directly to the things, seize them, grasp them and consume them.” See also Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §44. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 76: “The free will is consequently the idealism which does not consider things as they are to be existing in and for themselves, whereas realism declares those things to be absolute, even if they are found only in the form of finitude. Even the animal does not subscribe to this realist philosophy, for it consumes things and thereby proves that they are not absolutely self-sufficient.” See Hegel, G. W. F. (2010), Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard (p. 109): “Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.”
30 This language of “showing up” in experience was suggested to me by Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla. See also Kukla, R. and M. N. Lance (2009), “Yo!” and “Lo!”: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press.
31 Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §371. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. London and New York: Allen & Unwin and Humanities Press, p. 429:
The stone cannot become diseased, because it comes to an end in the negative of itself, is chemically dissolved, does not endure in its form, and is not the negative of itself which expands over its opposite (as in illness and self-feeling). Desire, the feeling of lack, is also, to itself, the negative. Desire relates itself to itself as the negative—it is itself and is, to itself, that which is lacking.
32 This is one way of taking Robert Pippin’s gloss on Hegel’s claim that “self-consciousness is desire itself,” namely, as a way of having certain things show up in experience (Pippin, R. B. (2010), Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press).
33 In a most unfortunate turn of phrase, Klaus Hartmann once called his interpretation of Hegel a “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel (Hartmann, K. (1972), “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, A. MacIntyre. New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday). This has led some to challenge not only Hartmann’s view but a series of other interpretations as “non-metaphysical” interpretations of Hegel. Their retort to the non-metaphysical reading is to point out that Hegel not only says he has a metaphysics, he actually has a metaphysics. (This is usually taken to underwrite the Schellingian interpretation of Hegel.) Hartmann’s view was much more limited. In saying that Hegel was “non-metaphysical,” Hartmann only meant that Hegel was not a metaphysician in Martin Heidegger’s sense. Heidegger accused the philosophical tradition of being metaphysical in that it took the question of the meaning of Being to be equivalent to the question, “Of all beings, which being is the most real?” For Heidegger, Hegel’s particular spin on this has to be that “spirit” is the most real of all Beings. Hartmann’s “non-metaphysical” reading was simply a rejection of that Heideggerian interpretation. Ignoring the rather obvious Heideggerian context, others have taken Hartmann to be arguing instead for some kind of version of Hegel as doing something like the analysis of language that was a bit of a fashion in the 1970s in Anglophone philosophy, but that simply was never Hartmann’s point. In the wider, non-Heideggerian sense of “metaphysics,” of course Hegel had a metaphysics. The issue of “metaphysical” versus “non-metaphysical” interpretations is thus a red herring. For an interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics inspired by Hartmann’s anti-Heideggerian reading, see Brinkmann, K. E. (2010), Idealism Without Limits: Hegel and the Problem of Objectivity. New York: Springer.
34 Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, B133: “As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. From this original combination many consequences follow.”
35 Thus, the Phenomenology in its Encyclopedia form takes the shape of “consciousness,” whose truth is “self-consciousness,” whose truth is “universal self-consciousness,” whose truth is “reason.” That much can be gathered by only reading the table of contents.
36 Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, p. 20 (Bxiii): “They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its
own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining.”
37 Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, §213: “Die Idee ist das Wahre an und für sich, die absolute Einheit des Begriffs und der Objektivität.” (English: “The Idea is the true in and for itself, the absolute unity of concept and objectivity.”)
38 Such a way of handling infinite regresses also had to do with Hegel’s relation to modern and ancient skepticism. The definitive treatment of this is Forster, M. N. (1989), Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
39 This way of formulating the issue draws heavily on the way the distinctions are drawn in Moore, A. W. (2012), The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. New York: Cambridge University Press.
CHAPTER 13
ROMANTICISM
FRED RUSH
13.1 INTRODUCTION
In academic discourse the term “romanticism” most often designates an art-historical period and the term “romantic” a kind of art, whether that art is produced in such a historical period or not. The terms are much less frequently applied to a period or to a type of philosophy.1 The standard periodization of artistic romanticism in Europe runs from its beginnings in the literary proto-romanticism of the German Sturm und Drang and the Ossian craze in the mid-eighteenth century to its end in the vestiges of musical romanticism at the outset of the twentieth century. Philosophical romanticism was limited to a select group of German-speaking, non-academic thinkers, to but two or three hubs of activity, and flourished for only a period of six years (1795 to 1801). By contrast, if one dates the phenomenon of German idealism roughly and conservatively from the publication of the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 to Hegel’s death in 1831 one has a half-century of concerted and systematic philosophy to deal with. And if one is more liberal, as Marx was for instance, and includes Feuerbach, Bauer, and other Left Hegelians among the lot, one moves the endpoint to the mid-1840s. If one counts arid neo-Kantianism in the mix and adds its spandrels in Austria and America, idealism is still with us. Not so its cousin, philosophical romanticism. After its heyday in the last half of the last decade of the eighteenth century in what was to become Germany, philosophical romanticism only reemerges intermittently.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 49