The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Michael Mack (PhD Cambridge) is Reader in English Literature at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging our Infatuation with Number (Bloomsbury, 2014), How Literature Changes the way we Think (Continuum, 2011), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (Continuum, 2010), German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001).

  Rudolf A. Makkreel is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University and the author of Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies and Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: the Hermeneutical Import of the ‘Critique of Judgment.’ Also co-editor of Dilthey’s Selected Works and of The Ethics of History; Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy; Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences. Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy from 1983 to 1998 and awarded fellowships by the NEH, DAAD, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Thyssen Stiftung, and Volkswagen Stiftung. He is currently writing a book entitled Orientation and Judgment in Critical Hermeneutics.

  Barbara Gail Montero is Associate Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York. She has published papers on a wide range of topics related to the mind and is author of a forthcoming Oxford University Press book, The Myth of ‘Just do it’: Thought and Effort in Expert Action. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. You can find more about her and her research at http://barbaramontero.wordpress.com/.

  Dalia Nassar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy 1795–1804 (Chicago University Press, 2013). Her article, “From a Philosophy of Self to a Philosophy of Nature: Goethe and the Development of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2010), was awarded the prize for “Best Essay published in 2010” by the Goethe Society of North America. She has been a recipient of research awards from the DAAD (2003, 2004), the Thyssen-Stiftung (2009), and, most recently, the Australian Research Council (2012–15).

  Lydia Patton is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Dr Patton’s research centers on the history and philosophy of science, and on related issues in epistemology. Recent work focuses on experiment and theory building, on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science and philosophy, and on Kant’s philosophy as a response to empiricism and rationalism. Her published works include “Experiment and Theory Building” (Synthese); “The Paradox of Infinite Given Magnitude” (Kant-Studien); “Hermann Von Helmholtz” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy); and “Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori” (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science).

  Terry Pinkard has taught at Georgetown University from 1975 to 2000, at Northwestern University between 2000 and 2005, and at Georgetown from 2005 to the present. He is the author of, among other books, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000); German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism; and Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is an Ehrenprofessor at Tübingen University in Germany, and he has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He gave the Guang-Hua lectures in 2011 at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

  Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (US). He is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia), and Arché Professorial Fellow at the University of St Andrews (UK). He works in many areas, including metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and Asian philosophy, but is best known for his work on philosophical logic—especially paraconsistent logic. He is the author of over 200 papers, and books including In Contradiction (2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2006), Beyond the Limits of Thought (2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002), Towards Non-Being (Oxford University Press, 2005), Doubt Truth to be a Liar (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2008). His new book, One, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

  Michael Quante (1962) is full Professor of Practical Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University. He is Speaker of the Zentrum für Bioethik and Co-Editor of the journal Hegel Studien. His books (in English) include: Hegel’s Concept of Action (Cambridge University Press 2004, paperback ed. 2007), Enabling Social Europe (Springer 2005; co-authored with Bernd v. Maydell et al.), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2008; co-edited with Dean Moyar), Moral Realism (Helsinki 2004 (= Acta Filosofica Fennica Vol. 76); co-edited with Jussi Kotkavirta), and Pragmatic Idealism (Rodopi 1998; co-edited with Axel Wüstehube).

  Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published extensively on Hegel and German idealism, and his interests include idealist approaches to logic and theology as well as the links between idealism and later pragmatist and analytic approaches to philosophy. His books include Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Logic of Affect (Cornell University Press, 1999), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009).

  Fred Rush teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

  Ulrich Schlösser has taught at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and at the Universities of Jena, Sheffield and Toronto. He is now Professor for Kant and German Idealism at the Universität Tübingen. Ulrich Schlösser has published on the relation between cognition and aesthetics in Kant’s philosophy, on Jacobi, Fichte, and on Hegel’s philosophy of mind in the Jena period.

  Sally Sedgwick is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her PhD in 1985 from the University of Chicago, and has held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the universities of Bonn, Bern, and Luzern. Her publications include the monographs Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford University Press, 2012). In 2009/10, she was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association.

  Christian Spahn studied Philosophy, Communication Science, and German Literature at the University of Essen, Germany. He received his Masters from the University of Notre Dame, USA, and his PhD from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany, with the study Lebendiger Begriff—Begriffenes Leben: Zur Grundlegung der Philosophie des Organischen bei G.W.F. Hegel (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), analysing the logical foundation of Hegel’s philosophy of biology. His research areas include the philosophy of biology, epistemology, and German Idealism. Spahn was a post-doctorate fellow at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität of Jena, Germany, and taught in Fulda, Jena, and Bamberg, Germany. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Keimyung University, Daegu, South Korea.

  Lina Steiner directs a Research Center for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is the author of For Humanity’s Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and a number of articles on literary history and theory, which have appeared in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Slavic Review, Russian Literature, and other journals. Her current book-length projects focus on the conceptual, intellectual, and disciplinary history of Philology in Germa
ny, Eastern Europe, and the United States, and on Leo Tolstoy’s filiations with the German philosophical tradition.

  Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer is Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Leipzig since 1992. His special interests are in the philosophy of logic and language, mind and action, and philosophy of German Idealism, esp. Kant and Hegel. Selected publications include: Hegels Analytische Philosophie. Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992); “Intuition, Understanding, and the Human Form of Life”, in Heikki Ikäheimo & Arto Laitinen eds., Recognition and Social Ontology (Brill, 2011, 85–113); “The Question of System: How to Read the Development from Kant to Hegel,” Inquiry 49, 1/2006, 80–102; and “Mathematical Thinking in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” International Yearbook of German Idealism, 3/2005, 243–60.

  Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2004), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2006), An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Polity Press, 2007), and Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011). She also edited The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Other topics on which she has published articles include the Frankfurt School and the Early German Romantics, on whom she is currently completing a monograph.

  Claudia Wirsing is currently completing her PhD on Hegel’s concept of reality in the “Science of Logic” at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, and is research assistant at the University of Braunschweig—Institute of Technology. She is also co-editing the German Yearbook of Philosophy on Hegel’s Science of Logic (200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, Meiner Press) with Anton Friedrich Koch, Friedrike Schick, and Klaus Vieweg. She has published in the fields of social philosophy (with a focus on critical theory), epistemology and ontology as well as on German Idealism.

  John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. His research focuses on Immanuel Kant and his student and rival, Johann Gottfried Herder. He works more widely in history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. His key publications are: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His current research involves the genesis of biology in eighteenth-century Germany.

  Günter Zöller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. He studied at the University of Bonn, the Ecole normale supérieure, Paris and Brown universities, and held visiting professorships at Princeton University, Emory University, Seoul National University, McGill University, and Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as visiting fellowships at Queen’s College, Oxford, Harvard University, and University of Bologna. A past President of the International Fichte Society, past Vice President of the North American Kant Society, and editor of Fichte’s Collected Works of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, he is the author of Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy (1998) and Fichte lesen (2013).

  INTRODUCTION

  NO period of history has been richer in philosophical discoveries than Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And while it was the eighteenth century that saw Germany attain maturity in the discipline (above all in the works of Immanuel Kant), it was arguably the nineteenth century that bore the greatest philosophical fruits.

  This volume aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of nineteenth-century Germany that will be helpful to readers of very different sorts, all the way from laypersons to undergraduates to experts. The chapters focus on several different areas: individual philosophers (e.g. Hegel, Marx), philosophical movements (e.g. Idealism, Romanticism), areas of philosophy (e.g. Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language), and philosophical topics (e.g. Skepticism and Epistemology, The Other). We have chosen the subjects of the chapters, and also to some extent guided their composition, with a view to maximizing comprehensiveness of coverage and reducing overlaps. However, since we believe the coverage of important subjects from a variety of perspectives to be a virtue, we have not sought to eliminate overlaps altogether, and we have made no attempt to dictate any particular approach let alone party line to contributors, who have been free to cover their subjects as they see fit.

  The German philosophy of the nineteenth century, and accordingly the chapters in this volume as well, can be roughly divided into several main parts or aspects, and it may be helpful to say a few words about each of these here at the start.

  A first is German Idealism. The founder of this movement was Kant, whose work really belongs to the eighteenth century and therefore lies beyond the official scope of this volume. But he is included here to a certain extent, and his main successors in the movement, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, all fall more squarely within the nineteenth century and therefore receive extensive coverage here. The thesis of “idealism” that ties this movement together is quite Protean. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” largely argued from a set of fairly technical considerations concerning the alleged existence of “synthetic a priori” knowledge (roughly, knowledge that is non-trivial but independent of experience) in such disciplines as mathematics to the mind-dependence of space, time, and their contents, while also, however, insisting that beyond this knowable but mind-dependent spatio-temporal realm there is an unknowable realm of mind-independent “things in themselves.” Fichte then argued that the notion of “things in themselves” was self-contradictory, that everything was dependent on the human mind, and that human beings therefore enjoyed a radical sort of freedom. Schelling began his career as a follower of Fichte, but then gradually came to believe that Fichte’s radical subjectivism was inadequate, that the self was in fact only one side of a single metaphysical principle (“the Absolute”) of which nature was the other, equally important, side. This “philosophy of identity” (as it came to be known), which owed much to Spinoza, was subsequently adopted and modified by Schelling’s friend and colleague Hegel, who developed it in a way that tended to emphasize its subjective over its objective side. Finally, Schopenhauer developed a position that can also be classified as a form of “idealism,” drawing from the tradition just described but also adding the more distinctive conception that the feature of the subject that is most metaphysically fundamental is the will rather than cognition. German Idealism’s thesis of “idealism” is still taken quite seriously by philosophers today. But the importance of German Idealism also reaches far beyond it. One of the other things tying this movement together is an ideal of system in philosophy: roughly, an ideal of covering all forms of human cognition within a single theory that is not only self-consistent but also connects them all together in a way that reveals an illuminating pattern. As a result, the philosophers in this tradition have much to say about a wide range of important subjects, from science to morals to politics to aesthetics to history to religion and beyond. And much of what they have to say about these subjects is fascinating even independently of their idealism.

  This volume contains a number of chapters that discuss various aspects of German Idealism. Kant and his nineteenth-century followers are discussed in Frederick Beiser’s “Neo-Kantianism,” Fichte in Günter Zöller’s “Fichte,” Schelling in Markus Gabriel’s “Schelling,” Hegel in Paul Redding’s “Hegel,” and Schopenhauer in Sebastian Gardner’s “Schopenhauer.” In addition, several chapters discuss specific aspects of the German Idealists’ positions, including Ulrich Schlösser’s “Skepticism and Epistemology,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics,” Alison Stone’s “Philosophy of Nature,” Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind,” Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” Jean-François Kervégan
’s “Political Philosophy,” Sally Sedgwick’s “Philosophy of History,” Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung,” and Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology.”

  Another part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is German Romanticism, a movement whose leading lights were Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher. This movement, which was more or less contemporary with German Idealism, is much less well known by philosophers in the Anglophone world, but is arguably just as important. Unlike the Idealists, the Romantics were anti-systematic and championed a fusion between philosophy and literature. Both of these stances may initially provoke suspicion among Anglophone philosophers. But that is a hasty response. For there are good arguments against systematizing in philosophy, and the sort of fusion of philosophy and literature that the Romantics envisaged was at least as much a matter of making literature theoretical as of making theory literary. Like the Idealists, the Romantics espoused a monistic metaphysics and had a strong interest in skepticism. Indeed, their conception of skepticism was often even more radical (e.g. Friedrich Schlegel went as far as to skeptically question logical law) and their considered response to it stayed closer to it than did the outright anti-skeptical responses offered by the Idealists: according to the Romantics, we can never achieve more than an “endless striving” towards knowledge. However, the greatest achievements of the Romantics arguably lay in a different area: as serious historians and linguists, they perceived, and were profoundly interested in, the phenomenon of deep historical and cultural difference or Otherness (Friedrich Schlegel already wrote early in his career of an “absolute difference” between ancient and modern culture, for example). They also had a sincere cosmopolitan respect for the historical/cultural Other. This whole position played a major role in the development of “historicism” in the nineteenth century. It also led to important theoretical and methodological developments by the Romantics themselves. For example, inheriting a “linguistic turn” that Herder and Hamann had already introduced in the eighteenth century, they developed a new discipline of “comparative grammar,” which constituted the beginning of modern linguistics, and they developed sophisticated new theories of understanding (“hermeneutics”) and of translation that were designed to cope with the problem of radical mental difference, for example, the problem posed to both interpretation and translation by the existence of radically differing conceptual resources. They also made important contributions to re-thinking the history of philosophy—dropping teleological schemas for interpreting it such as those that were espoused by Kant and Hegel in favor of greater open-mindedness and interpretive accuracy. And they made an even larger contribution to re-thinking the nature of ancient tragedy (as well as of genre more generally), in particular sharply rejecting Aristotle’s account of it in the Poetics and developing a new interpretation of it as deeply religious-Dionysiac and political in character (this led to Nietzsche’s similar interpretation of it later in the century in The Birth of Tragedy and has largely been confirmed by more soberly detailed modern scholarship). The Romantics were also, at least in the early and best period of their thought, radicals in domestic politics who championed democracy, liberalism, individuality, the rights of Jews, and respect for women. This progressive political stance went hand in hand with a refreshing boldness in their theorizing and a radically experimental approach to living (they were pioneers of what J.S. Mill would later call “experiments in living”). For example, Schleiermacher advocated the possibility of an endless variety of forms of religion, including forms without God (!), and Schlegel asked why there should not be a “mariage à quatre.”