The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Becker-Cantorino, Barbara. Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche—Werke—Wirkung. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000.

  Bovenschen, Silvia. Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979.

  Dohm, Hedwig. Die wissenschaftliche Emancipation der Frauen. Berlin, 1893.

  Eichner, Hans. “Das Bild der Frau in der Frühromantik: Theorie und Wirklichkeit.” In Against the Grain/Gegen den Strich: Selected Essays/Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Edited by Hans Eichner and Rodney Symington. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003.

  Foley, Peter. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Essay on a Theory of Sociable Behavior (1799): A Contextual Interpretation. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.

  Frederiksen, Elke. “Die Frau als Autorin zur Zeit der Romantik: Anfänge einer weiblichen literarischen Tradition.” In Gestaltet und gestaltend: Frauen in der deutschen Literatur (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik). Edited by Marianne Burkhard. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980.

  Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. “A good Woman, and No Heroine.” In In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800. Edited by Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

  Goldman, Emma. “The Failure of Christianity.” In Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, 3rd ed. Compiled and edited by Alix Kates Shulman. New York: Humanity Books, 1998.

  Livingstone, Angela. Lou Andreas Salomé. London: Gordon Fraser, 1984

  Lund, Hannah Lotte. “Emanzipation in Halböffentlichkeit? Geschlechterverhältnisse und politische Partizipation im literarischen Salon um 1800. Eine Annäherung.” In Revolution und Emanzipation: Geschlechterordnungen in Europa um 1800. Edited by Katharina Rennhak and Virginia Richter. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2004.

  Novalis. Novalis Schriften, vol. 2. Das philosophische Werk I. In Zusammenarbeit mit Hans-Joachim Mähl und Gerhard Schulz. Edited by Richard Samuel. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1981.

  Schlegel, Friedrich. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801). In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe. Edited by Hans Eichner. Zürich: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967.

  Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated and with an introduction by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.

  Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Edited by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968.

  Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. I.2. Edited by Günter Meckenstock. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984.

  Thandeka. “Schleiermacher, Feminism and Liberation Theologies: A Key.” In The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Edited by Jacqueline Mariña. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  * * *

  1 I am not arguing that no credible feminism can arise from Nietzsche’s philosophy, but only that to the extent that the latter is egoistic and nihilistic, it is also anti-feminist. Interpretations of Nietzsche’s work that do not read it in this way are of course more likely to support a Nietzsche-inspired feminism. A prime example is Emma Goldman’s feminism, which was of a piece with her anarcho-syndicalist commitments. For instance, she read Nietzsche’s account of slave morality, especially in Christianity, as liberating but not elitist: “True, Nietzsche has opposed the slave-morality idea inherent in Christianity in behalf of a master morality for the privileged few. But I venture to suggest that his master ideas had nothing to do with the vulgarity of station, caste or wealth. Rather did it mean the masterful in human possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful things.” (“The Failure of Christianity,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, 3rd ed., compiled and edited by Alix Kates Shulman, New York: Humanity Books, 1998, pp. 232–3).

  2 Peter Foley discusses the important role that Henriette’s friendship with Friedrich Schleiermacher had on the work of that latter, and especially his theory of what sociability could be at its best. See Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Essay on a Theory of Sociable Behavior (1799): A Contextual Interpretation, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006, p. 71.

  3 Even the wives of the hosts remained in the background. See Hannah Lotte Lund, “Emanzipation in Halböffentlichkeit? Geschlechterverhältnisse und politische Partizipation im literarischen Salon um 1800. Eine Annäherung,” in Revolution und Emanzipation: Geschlechterordnungen in Europa um 1800, eds. Katharina Rennhak and Virginia Richter, Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2004, p. 38.

  4 Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche—Werke—Wirkung, München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000, pp. 189ff.

  5 Peter Firchow in his introduction to his translation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, a novel briefly notes one positive, later review of Dorothea Schlegel’s book: He chronicles a short list of well-known critics who denied that Friedrich’s Lucinde has enough form to be called a “novel” and mentions a later nineteenth-century criticism of Lucinde by Rudolf Haym in his epic volume Die Romantische Schule, as “an aesthetic monstrosity,” whereas Haym called Dorothea’s Florentin in its “modest lack of independence a hundred times better novel than [Lucinde’s] presumptuous originality.” (Rudolf Haym, Berlin 1870, p. 665) (Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. and with an introduction by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971)

  6 A “novel of virtue” or virtue put to the test, for example, Richard Samuelson’s Clarissa.

  7 A coming of age novel, of which genre Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was (and still is) considered the pinnacle of achievement in the genre. Dorothea admired but could not identify with Goethe’s Meister. Becker-Cantorino sees Florentin as in part a parody of Goethe’s famous work and of the genre in general. Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, pp. 138ff.

  8 Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, pp. 134–5.

  9 Sara Friedrichsmeyer, in her essay “A good Woman, and No Heroine” writes that Caroline had to interrupt her own writing after Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, along with Dorothea’s son, came to live in her household: “Clearly the new living arrangement provided its own form of intellectual stimulation, but the gap in her letters also occurred because she was, quite simply, overworked. In October of 1799 she wrote to Luise Gotter that for the last three months she had had ‘not a moment’s peace,’ often feeding fifteen to eighteen people for the main meal of the day.” (In In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800, ed. Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, p. 120.)

  10 Silvia Bovenschen in Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979.

  11 Reinhard M. G. Nickisch in “Briefkultur und sozialgeschichtliche Bedeutung des Frauenbriefes im 18. Jahrhundert,” in C. H. Beck, Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, I: Vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler, Munich, 1988, p. 406, quoted in Carol Diethe: Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 5).

  12 Hans Eichner, although sympathetic to the plight of women writers at that time, ignores her epistolary contributions in “Das Bild der Frau in der Frühromantik: Theorie und Wirklichkeit,” and dismisses her and Dorothea’s contributions as merely “reflected glory” (p. 165) in Against the Grain/Gegen den Strich: Selected Essays/Ausgewählte Aufsätze, eds. Hans Eichner and Rodney Symington, Bern: Peter Lang, 2003, pp. 151–69. See also Elke Frederiksen’s assessment of Caroline as capitulating to the male writers around her in “Die Frau als Autorin zur Zeit der Romantik: Anfänge einer weiblichen literarischen Tradition,” in Gestaltet und gestaltend: Frauen in der deutschen Literatur (Amsterdamer Beitrag
e zur neueren Germanistik), ed. Marianne Burkhard, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980, p. 97.

  13 See Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, chapter I. A “Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frauen und Literatur im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert” for an eye-opening account of the obstacles faced by women intellectuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the German-speaking lands, including the philosopher J. G. Herder’s chilling claim (in a letter to a female friend) that his visceral disgust for scholarly women is “natural,” and that, his female correspondent’s remonstrations notwithstanding, he still “continues to be very much for the Arabic saying that ‘a hen that crows and a woman who is scholarly are evil omens: one cuts both their throats.’” (p. 31). Accusations of “capitulation” also fail to appreciate how difficult it is to develop a sense of oneself, let alone become oneself, when one is married off as a teenager to a man practically one’s father’s age—which was the case with most women at the time, and among the romantic circle not only with Caroline, but also Henriette Herz (married at 15) and Dorothea Mendelssohn/Veit/Schlegel (married at 19).

  14 Novalis Schriften, vol. 2, Das philosophische Werk I, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz, Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1981, p. 435. Becker-Cantorino correctly points out that their commitment to letter-writing as a literary genre was always with reference to the men in the group, but it was also the case that Schlegel encouraged Caroline to use the genre. Becker-Cantorino claims that this amounted to marginalizing women, but clearly the genre itself was held in esteem, even if the women’s contributions were considered “Briefchen” (the German diminutive term for letter) by contrast to the men’s “wahre Briefe” (“genuine” letters). Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, pp. 167–8.

  15 Similarly it can be argued that there is an undeniable Jewish “touch” and for that matter a bourgeois “touch” present in early German romanticism. See Peter Foley’s account of the “pejorative” sense of the term “salon” in the late eighteenth century, and his account of Henriette Herz’s salon as an attempt to expand the salon’s function beyond a place for Jewish families to interact with the non-Jewish community in Berlin into an intellectual space that (ideally) transcended gender, ethnicity, and class. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Essay on a Theory of Sociable Behavior (1799): A Contextual Interpretation; cf. Becker-Cantorino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, pp. 19–26.

  16 See for instance, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, Introduction to their edition of Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968, p. 4: “It is perhaps the collective character of this early manifestation of Romanticism in Germany which most conspicuously distinguishes it from all other Romantic movements in Europe.”

  17 See Athenäum fragment 125, in Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801). In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (KFSA), ed. Hans Eichner, Zürich: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967. Vol. 2, p. 185.

  18 S. Friedrichsmeyer, in her essay on Caroline Schlegel/Schelling, “A Good Woman, and No Heroine,” in In the Shadow of Olympus.

  19 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. and with an introduction by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, p. 49.

  20 Lucinde (Firchow trans.), p. 74.

  21 Lucinde (Firchow trans.), pp. 47, 93.

  22 Lucinde (Firchow trans.), p. 103.

  23 Blüthenstaub #20, p. 419, Novalis Schriften, vol. 2.

  24 Blüthenstaub #20, p. 419, Novalis Schriften, vol. 2.

  25 Fichte-Studien, #566, Novalis Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 269–70.

  26 Blüthenstaub #16, Novalis Schriften, vol. 2, 417, 419.

  27 For more on the debate about the “seat of the soul” and its influence on Novalis’ Kant reception, see my discussion of Kant’s response to Sömmering on the incoherence of the very concept of a “seat of the soul,” in Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 143ff.

  28 Novalis Schriften, vol. 2, 419.

  29 Essay on a Theory of Sociable Conduct, p. 545. Romanticizing, he goes on to say, uses fantasy and invention to make the ordinary appear extraordinary, on the one hand, and on the other to demystify “the higher, the unknown, the mystical and the unending.”

  30 Or rather the first part of what was to be a three part book. The Essay was never completed, adding yet another fragment to the early German romantic collection.

  31 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. I.2, p. 165; Foley, p. 154. References to Schleiermacher’s Essay here and in what follows are to the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (vol. I.2) of his works (hereafter KGA), ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), followed by the pagination in Peter Foley’s translation, included in his book.

  32 Schleiermacher, KGA, p. 165; Foley, p. 154.

  33 Schleiermacher, KGA p. 165; Foley, p. 154.

  34 Schleiermacher, KGA p. 170; Foley, p. 159.

  35 Schleiermacher, KGA, pp. 170, 178; Foley pp. 170, 168–9.

  36 Becker-Cantorino also emphasizes the essentially ethical focus of the Essay (Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, pp. 188–90) and Peter Foley argues that Schleiermacher was clearly influenced by Kant’s ethics to paint a concrete picture of a Kantian “kingdom of ends,” that is, an ideal space in which each individual recognizes every other individual as a rational being and therefore as an end in itself and interacts with them accordingly. He discusses the influence of Kant’s “kingdom of ends” on Schleiermacher’s Essay as “the point of departure for Schleiermacher’s ethical and social considerations.” Foley, pp. 112ff.

  37 “Herz’s role in [the construction of Schleiermacher’s Essay] cannot be overemphasized. As a leading figure in the singularly most significant salon that Schleiermacher is known to have frequented, she takes on a position that brings her into such close proximity to the writing of the Essay that her intellectual environment can be seen as providing input to it.” Foley, p. 17.

  38 Both Becker-Cantorino and Foley make these points very clearly. Foley discusses the “eroticized” nature of women’s presence in the salons as reported in later, often very sexist and antisemitic accounts of them, concluding that the marginalization of women by their sexuality was no doubt a fact: “Violations of the norms notwithstanding, salon sociability does not offer us a feminized sphere of women’s emancipation” (Foley, p. 67).

  39 See Thandeka, “Schleiermacher, Feminism and Liberation Theologies: A Key,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 287–306.

  40 Hedwig Dohm, Die wissenschaftliche Emancipation der Frauen, Berlin, 1893, p. 60ff., trans. in Carol Diethe, Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 156.

  41 “In Nietzsche’s Shadow,” chapter 6 of Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998, p. 186. See also Angela Livingstone, Lou Andreas Salomé, London, 1984.

  42 Diethe, Towards Emancipation, “Epilogue,” pp. 198–9.

  43 Ecce Homo, op. cit., p. 714.

  44 Schlegel, Lucinde, Lyceum fragment 112, p. 157.

  45 Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with the collaboration of Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner, vol. 1, p. 92.

  PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS

  CHAPTER 28

  SKEPTICISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY

  ULRICH SCHLÖSSER

  28.1 INTRODUCTION

  FOR both Kant and post-Kantian German idealists, responding to skepticism is one of the essential tasks of philosophy; the corresponding conceptions of knowledge, however, change rapidly. Kant primarily discusses the possibility of what he calls “Erkenntnisse.” These are mental representations which refer to objects, but which can be false. Knowledge—“Wissen”—is only a minor topic in the first Critique. In Fichte and Hegel, by contras
t, “Wissen” moves from the margins to the center of their projects. Philosophy itself is considered to be the paradigm case of it. The mental activity of construction involved in producing an evident insight (Fichte) or the embeddedness of a proposition in an organism-like network of thought (Hegel) become the new characteristics of knowledge. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the focus of attention shifts towards the mathematical sciences, as can be seen in Helmholtz, Cohen, Natorp, and others. This means that content from the sciences is now the primary candidate for knowledge. In addition, the close relation between skepticism and knowledge we find in Kant or Hegel is dissolved. The results of systematically applying the methods of the sciences have from the very beginning a higher credibility than any anti-skeptical philosophical reasoning can provide. Philosophy presupposes and reflects on the “fact of science” without introducing standards of validity from the outside.

  28.2 KANT

  Kant’s critical philosophy is the crucial point of reference for different conceptions of epistemology and of the role of skepticism in nineteenth-century German Philosophy. The post-Kantian idealists in the early nineteenth century try to transform his framework from inside. The neo-Kantians from the mid-nineteenth century onwards pretend to go back to Kant whereas they actually change the meaning of his terms and move towards a modern philosophy of science. Thus it is helpful in both cases to begin the survey with a reminder of some features of Kant’s position.