The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

  [G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1 (=Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 18), ed. by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).]

  Hegel, G. W. F., The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).

  [G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, vol. 3 (=Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 8), ed. by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).]

  Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).

  [G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (=Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vols. 5–6), ed. by E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).]

  Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  [Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. by J. Timmermann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998).]

  Marx, Karl, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

  Marx, Karl, ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,’ in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 133–45.

  Marx, Karl, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wisart, 1975).

  Marx, Karl, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  Marx, Karl, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).

  Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993).

  Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Werke (Berlin: Karl Dietz, 1961ff.).

  Plato, Parmenides, trans. M. L. Gill and P. Ryan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

  Plato, Sophist, trans. N. P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).

  Plato, The Republic, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

  Platon, Cratylus, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).

  Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Dialektik, ed. by Manfred Frank, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).

  Secondary Literature

  Allison, Henry E., Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, rev. edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

  Ameriks, Karl, ‘The critique of metaphysics: The structure and fate of Kant’s dialectic,’ in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 269–302.

  Asmuth, Christoph, ed., Sein—Reflexion—Freiheit: Aspekte der Philosophie Johann Gottlieb Fichtes (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997).

  Barthes, Roland, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens. Notes de cours et séminaires au Collège de France 1976—1977 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Imec, 2002).

  Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962).

  Forster, Michael N., ‘Hegel’s Dialectical Method’, in F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 130–70.

  Forster, Michael N., After Herder. Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Gloy, Karen, ‘Fichtes Dialektiktypen’, Fichte-Studien 17 (2000), 103–24.

  Grier, Michelle, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  Hamlyn, D. W., ‘Aristotle on Dialectic’, Philosophy 65 (1990), No. 254, 465–76.

  Hammacher, Klaus, ‘Fichtes praxologische Dialektik’, Fichte-Studien 1 (1990), 25–40.

  Houlgate, Stephen, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006).

  Janke, Wolfgang, ‘Limitative Dialektik: Überlegungen im Anschluss an die Methodenreflexion in Fichtes Grundlage 1794/95 §4 (GA I,2, 283–85)’, Fichte-Studien 1 (1990), 9–24.

  Limnatis, Nectarios G., ed., The Dimensions of Hegel’s Dialectic (London: Continuum, 2010).

  Martin, Wayne M., Idealism and Objectivity. Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  Mohr, Georg and Willascheck, Marcus, ed., Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998).

  Pinkard, Terry, Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

  Rauscher, Frederick, ‘The Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason: The Positive Role of Reason,’ in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 290–309.

  Rosen, Michael, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  Schäfer, Rainer, Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik: entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001).

  Strawson, Peter F., The Bounds of Sense (London: Metheun, 1966).

  Wolff, Michael, ‘Dialektik—eine Methode? Zu Hegels Ansichten von der Form einer philosophischen Wissenschaft’, in 200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. by Anton Friedrich Koch et al. (Hamburg: Meiner 2014).

  Wood, Allen, W. ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’, in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 245–65.

  * * *

  1 Dialegesthai (διαλέγɛσθαι) consists of the prefix dia- (1. through, right through; 2. in different directions; 3. completion, to the end), and the root leg-, which is to be found in logos (speech, relation, reason) and legein (to say, to talk). According to Aristotle, Zenon was the originator of dialectic. Dialektikê (διαλɛκτική) appears adjectivally and as noun in Plato, where it becomes a technical term for a scientific method.

  2 See Parmenides 136a–d. References to Plato are to the Stephanus pagination, references to Aristotle correspond to the Bekker numbering.

  3 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 264. All translations of German quotations in this text are my own in consultation with established translations; the latter have been tacitly amended where necessary.

  4 See also Republic 511b.

  5 Sophist 253b–c.

  6 Sophist 253c.

  7 See Parmenides 129a–c.

  8 Cratylus 390c 10–11.

  9 Sophist 253e.

  10 See D. W. Hamlyn, ‘Aristotle on Dialectic,’ in Philosophy 65 (1990), no. 254, 465–76.

  11 See Topics 100a 18.

  12 See Topics 104b.

  13 See Topics 105a.

  14 Anal. Pr. 48a 30.

  15 Topics 100a 29f.

  16 Topics 100a 18ff.

  17 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 307/B 364. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as CPR, followed by letter of the edition (A or B) and original page.

  18 On the difference between thinking and recognizing, see Kant CPR B 94, B 146, B 167, B 406.

  19 For a discussion of the relation between Dialectic and Metaphysics, see Karl Ameriks, ‘The critique of metaphysics: The structure and fate of Kant’s dialectic’, in Paul Guyer ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 269–302.

  20 CPR B 75.

  21 For a more precise description of the antinomies, see Allen W. Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’, in Paul Guyer ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers
ity Press, 2010), 245–65. For more detail on the arguments of the antinomies, see the chapters from Lothar Kreimendahl (sections 1–2), Eric Watkins (sections 3–8), and Henry Allison (section 9), in Georg Mohr and Marcus Willascheck eds., Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 413–90. For a ‘classical’ critique of Kant’s theory of reason, see Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); and for a more positive reading, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. part IV (‘The Transcendental Dialectic’), and Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  22 For a more precise description, see Frederick Rauscher, ‘The Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason: The Positive Role of Reason’, in Paul Guyer ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 290–309.

  23 See CPR A 643/B 671.

  24 CPR A 644/B 672.

  25 CPR A 669/B 697.

  26 On these different types, see the excellent and insightful contribution of Karen Gloy, ‘Fichtes Dialektiktypen’, in Fichte-Studien 17 (2000), 103–24.

  27 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 1794 edition, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 110. Further references to this text will be abbreviated SK, followed by page number.

  28 See Wolfgang Janke, ‘Limitative Dialektik: Überlegungen im Anschluss an die Methodenreflexion in Fichtes Grundlage 1794/95 §4 (GA I,2, 283–285)’, in Fichte-Studien 1 (1990), 9–24; Klaus Hammacher, ‘Fichtes praxologische Dialektik’, in Fichte-Studien 1 (1990), 25–40.

  29 On Fichte as the link between old and modern dialectic, see the essays by Klaus Hammacher (‘Fichte und das Problem der Dialektik’, 115–41) und Felix Krämer (‘Fichtes frühe Wissenschaftslehre als dialektische Erörterung’, 143–57) in Christoph Asmuth ed., Sein—Reflexion—Freiheit: Aspekte der Philosophie Johann Gottlieb Fichtes (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Grüner, 1997). Also Werner Hartkopf, ‘Die Dialektik Fichtes als Vorstufe zu Hegels Dialektik’, in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 21 (1967), 173–207.

  30 SK 101.

  31 SK 93.

  32 See Wayne M. Martin, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997). Martin points out that Fichte himself ‘has relatively little to say about the status and significance of this method’ (100). Martin’s central idea is that Fichte does ‘put a method of contradiction to work in providing a theory of objectivity’ (100).

  33 SK 105.

  34 SK 110.

  35 SK.

  36 At this point Fichte deviates from his Begriffsschrift (1794) in which he still posited the I and Not-I in an absolute I.

  37 SK 119.

  38 SK 110, 114.

  39 Hartkopf, Die Dialektik Fichtes als Vorstufe zu Hegels Dialektik, for example, 190 and 193.

  40 See Karen Gloy’s remarks, Fichtes Dialektiktypen, 118–22.

  41 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 1822 edition, ed. by Manfred Frank, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 47. Further references to this text will be abbreviated D, followed by volume and page number.

  42 D 2, 48.

  43 D 2, 48f.

  44 On the problem of Schleiermacher’s dialectic as a method for resolving interlinguistic disagreements in particular, see Michael N. Forster, After Herder. Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 344–50.

  45 See D 2, 52.

  46 See D 2, 53f.

  47 D 2, 63.

  48 See D 2, 64.

  49 D 2, 94.

  50 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 125–34. Further references to this text will be abbreviated EL, followed by page number. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 409–43. Further references will be abbreviated SL, followed by page number.

  51 EL 125 [§79].

  52 See here the corresponding points in Hegel’s texts, EL 154 (Addition), SL 106f. (Remark).

  53 EL 125 [§80].

  54 EL 125 [§80] (Addition).

  55 EL 128 [§81].

  56 EL 128 [§81].

  57 EL 128 [§81].

  58 EL 131 [§82].

  59 EL 131 [§82].

  60 EL 131 [§82].

  61 SL 417.

  62 EL 181 [§ 116].

  63 EL 182 [§117].

  64 EL 185 [§119].

  65 SL 436 [Remark 1].

  66 SL 441 [Remark 3].

  67 SL 440 [Remark 3].

  68 See especially EL, §84, §161, and §240. On Hegel’s various forms of dialectic see Rainer Schäfer, Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik: entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001); Nectarios G. Limnatis ed., The Dimensions of Hegel’s Dialectic (London: Continuum, 2010); Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Michael N. Forster, ‘Hegel’s Dialectical Method’, in F.C. Beiser ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 130–70; Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006).

  69 Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), here 425. Further references to this text will be abbreviated CCPE, followed by page number.

  70 Karl Marx, ‘Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), here 142.

  71 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wisart, 1975), here 185.

  72 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), here 99.

  73 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 255. Further references to this text will be abbreviated C, followed by page number.

  74 C 255f.

  75 C 342.

  76 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 706.

  77 C 772.

  78 Michael Wolff has shown that the belief that Hegel has a ‘dialectical method’ finds no support in his original writings (Michael Wolff, ‘Dialektik—eine Methode? Zu Hegels Ansichten von der Form einer philosophischen Wissenschaft’, in 200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Anton Friedrich Koch et al. (Hamburg: Meiner 2014, forthcoming).

  79 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 123–4 and 126.

  80 Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens. Notes de cours et séminaires au Collège de France 1976—1977 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Imec, 2002), 33. (‘Séance du 12 janvier, présentation’: 33–42).

  81 I would like to thank the editors as well as my colleagues at Jena University Suzanne Dürr, Stella Synegianni, Jan Urbich, and especially Adrian Wilding for extremely helpful comments and stimulating discussions, which helped me to improve the chapter considerably. It goes without saying that they are not responsible for any errors or infelicities which may remain in the text.

  CHAPTER 34

  EVOLUTION

  CHRISTIAN SPAHN

  34.1 ‘EVOLUTION’ AND ‘ENTWICKLUNG’ AS KEY CONCEPTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

  OUR understanding of the term evolution is nowadays closely linked to Darwin’s account of the biological development of species by means
of random mutations and natural selection, even if in the first editions of The Origin of Species Darwin never used the noun evolution.1 Evolution today usually denotes a random, non-goal-directed biological process of development that leads to un-predetermined novelty.

  When looking at German philosophy of the nineteenth century it is, however, necessary to distinguish between a narrower and strictly biological concept of evolution and a broader general paradigm of development of nature and culture. The latter, also labelled ‘Entwicklung’ or ‘Evolution’, was discussed both in relation and in opposition to the emerging biological concept of evolution. One of the most influential ideas in nineteenth-century German philosophy—starting from developments in the second half of the eighteenth century—was the vision of an overall ‘dynamization’ of the general metaphysical and physical worldview. While the notion of organic Darwinian evolution forcefully enters the stage in Germany only with Haeckel’s writings, long before Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 the broader concept of an overall development or Entwicklung was already playing a key role in many philosophical conceptions of culture and nature in German Philosophy. One can detect a slow, but clear transformation from a more static picture of nature—a fixed scala naturae with events guided by eternal causal laws following the Newtonian paradigm—to a dynamic picture of an overall development of cosmos and culture that comes to dominate nineteenth-century German philosophy. This transformation starts from more ratio-centrist perspectives which interpret the empirical world from the viewpoint of an atemporal conception of objective or subjective reason and culminates in German Historicism, Historical Materialism, and Lebensphilosophie as archetypal paradigms of a ‘temporalization’ of the general philosophical worldview. In these new approaches, human reason is now interpreted in the light of a changing empirical world. Consequently, both within the biological context and within the broader general metaphysical conception of Evolution and Entwicklung a shift in the prevalent interpretation of these concepts can be observed as well: a move from models of a more or less pre-determined schema of development according to fixed laws or God’s Providence towards an understanding of Evolution or Entwicklung as an open, undetermined, creative, or even chaotic mode of development. Accordingly, a radical shift from idealistic conceptions of nature towards explicitly anti-idealistic or materialistic philosophies occurs in Germany around the time of the publication of Darwin’s work. While older research naturally focused mainly on the reception of Darwinism in biology and philosophy in Germany after Darwin, newer research discusses a possible influence of German Romantic philosophy of nature on Darwin.