The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  This volume contains several chapters that discuss Romanticism, including Andreas Arndt’s “Schleiermacher,” Dalia Nassar’s “Friedrich Schlegel,” and Fred Rush’s “Romanticism” (which also takes into account the quasi-Romantic philosopher-poet Hölderlin). Other relevant chapters include Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung,” Andrew Bowie’s “Hermeneutics,” John H. Zammito’s “Historicism,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics,” and Jane Kneller’s “Feminism.”

  Two further parts of nineteenth-century German philosophy are each occupied by a single but towering thinker: Marx and Nietzsche. Although in many ways sharply opposed in their philosophical positions, Marx and Nietzsche also share certain things in common. These include a deep rootedness in the German philosophical tradition (in Marx’s case especially Hegel, in Nietzsche’s especially Schopenhauer); a respect for empirical evidence; a radical critique and rejection of the culture they found around them; as part of that, an unqualified dismissal of religion in general and Christianity in particular (in sharp contrast to the attempts to save both that had characterized most of their predecessors in German philosophy); an attempt to go beyond the sorts of critiques of traditional proofs of God and the sorts of disproofs of God’s existence that agnostic and atheistic predecessors had furnished in order to provide in addition a serious explanation of why, despite their extravagant falsehood, (Christian) religious beliefs acquire their grip on people’s minds, a project which led both of them to identify mechanisms that are not only deluding but also pernicious (in Marx’s case an ideological reinforcement of invidious class oppression, in Nietzsche’s a slandering of life motivated by Ressentiment); a critical rejection even of morality; and not least a fierce independent-mindedness and intellectual commitment, reflected in their uncompromising, solitary lifestyles (neither of them was a “professional philosopher” working within the confines of a university).

  Marx’s central ideas include the complex phenomenon of the “alienation” of human beings under capitalism that he describes in his early work, his material or economic theory of history, his labor theory of value, and his theory of ideology. He is by no means exclusively or even mainly the preserve of philosophers, and almost everything in his position has been contested both interpretively and in respect of its value. However, he has had the good fortune to have been blessed in recent decades with several philosophical interpreters who have been exegetically rigorous, sympathetic, and subtle in defending his positions (including G.A. Cohen and A.W. Wood). So his prominence in this volume should certainly occasion no surprise.

  This volume contains several chapters concerned with Marx’s position, including: Michael Quante’s “Marx” (which adopts the—of course, controversial—approach of interpreting Marx’s central ideas in light of his morally informed views about “alienation” in the early writings), Kurt Bayertz’s “Materialism,” Claudia Wirsing’s “Dialectics,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics,” Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology,” and Jean-François Kervégan’s “Political Philosophy.”

  Nietzsche, like the Romantics, is opposed to systematizing in philosophy (he writes in one place that “the will to a system is a lack of integrity”). Indeed, it is not even clear that he aspires to systematicity in the minimal sense of self-consistency. He is a merciless and penetrating critic of Christianity who diagnoses its otherworldism in psychological terms as a sort of slandering of this world (the only world there is, in his view) by people who have failed within it and who have therefore fallen prey to Ressentiment. He is perhaps even more important for his critique of Christian moral values and their secular descendants. Here his thought began from a deep, sympathetic knowledge of pre-Christian Greek culture, which he acquired through his early career as a classical philologist. This gave him access to a moral standpoint that was quite contrary to that of Christianity and its secular descendants, a standpoint that had endured for many centuries and with which they could be compared and found wanting (see, for example, his early work On Homer’s Contest). His own positive project concerning moral values, the project of their “revaluation,” is largely an attempt to revive Homeric values, albeit while also revising them. Nietzsche also develops a powerful methodological tool for understanding and criticizing modern moral values, a tool that goes beyond such straightforward comparisons: the method of “genealogy.” This method basically starts out from a historicist insight into the deep changes in values that have occurred over the course of history and attempts both to understand modern Europe’s moral outlook and to show its shortcomings by tracing it back to the earlier components that have over time contributed to and congealed into it. Another methodological tool that he brings to bear in his critique of modern morality and in other contexts is a sophisticated psychology, which in particular recognizes the role of the unconscious, active forgetting, and repression (in anticipation of Freud). Other aspects of his philosophy are fascinating as well (albeit both exegetically and intrinsically problematic), including his “perspectivism,” his principle of the “will to power,” and his doctrine of “eternal recurrence.”

  This volume contains two chapters that focus mainly on Nietzsche: Brian Leiter’s “Nietzsche” and Songsuk Susan Hahn’s “Perspectivism.” Other chapters that discuss aspects of Nietzsche’s thought include Katia Hay’s “Existentialism,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” and Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics.”

  Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is the philosophy of language, along with such closely related areas as linguistics, hermeneutics, and translation theory. Herder and Hamann had prepared the ground for nineteenth-century philosophy of language by sharply rejecting a traditional Enlightenment dualism concerning the relation between thought and language, concept and word, in favor of seeing thought as essentially dependent on and bounded by (or even identical with) language, and concepts as consisting in word-usages. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Romantics and Wilhelm von Humboldt took over this position and revised it in order to include a more holistic picture of language. They then used this as a foundation on which to build a new science of linguistics (Friedrich Schlegel and Humboldt), a new theory of interpretation (or “hermeneutics”), and a new theory of translation (in both of these cases mainly Schleiermacher). Nor did philosophy of language in nineteenth-century Germany remain confined to that group and its many direct descendants; it also came to play a large role in such diverse philosophers as Otto Gruppe, Nietzsche, Frege, and Fritz Mauthner.

  The present volume contains two contributions that discuss aspects of this side of nineteenth-century German philosophy: Hans-Johann Glock’s “Philosophy of Language” and Andrew Bowie’s “Hermeneutics.”

  Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is philosophy of history (in a broad sense). Nineteenth-century Germany was a golden age for the writing of history as such: including the history of law (e.g. Niebuhr and Savigny), the history of philosophy (e.g. Schleiermacher, Hegel, Zeller, Haym, and Dilthey), and general history (e.g. Ranke and Droysen). Philosophizing about history was correspondingly prominent as well. At least two very different forms of it can be distinguished. First, there were attempts to develop philosophies of history in a narrow sense: grand narratives about history that aimed to make sense of its overall course, typically in teleological terms. The most important figures here were Hegel and Marx. But second, and to some extent in deliberate rejection of such ambitious projects, there were also more modest methodological reflections on the discipline of history, including reflections concerning how, given the profound mutability of human thought, conceptualization, values, and so on over the course of history, it was even possible for historians to understand another age; reflections concerning what the theoretical purpose of writing history should be; and reflections concerning whether, and if so how, history could be scientific (as the natural scienc
es are). Two of the main contributors on these topics were Droysen and Dilthey, who between them developed a powerful unified answer to all three of the questions just mentioned, an answer that placed understanding and its methodology, hermeneutics, at the center of the discipline of history.

  The present volume contains chapters concerned with both of these sorts of “philosophy of history.” For the first, see especially Sally Sedgwick’s “Philosophy of History” (which mainly focuses on Hegel), as well as the relevant parts of Michael Quante’s “Marx.” For the second, see John H. Zammito’s “Historicism,” Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences,” and Rudolf A. Makkreel’s “Dilthey.”

  Closely connected with the philosophy of history, another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is a recognition of, and deep interest in, historical and cultural Otherness. This position involved a sharp rejection of Enlightenment universalism, in continuity with the rejection of it by eighteenth-century thinkers such as Herder. It often went hand-in-hand with a deep interest in individual Otherness as well. The Romantics, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey are all good examples of this recognition of, and interest in, historical and cultural Otherness. Their recognition of it had a deep empirical grounding (they all had an impressive knowledge of relevant languages and were skilled as historians and interpreters). Their strong interest in it had a variety of motives. One was simply a fascination with the phenomenon itself. Another was a fascination with its apparent philosophical implications, such as skepticism or relativism. (Dilthey was largely driven by these two motives, for example.) Another was a fascination with the contribution that recognizing it could make towards our better self-understanding, both by enabling us to see our own outlook in a comparative light and by enabling us to understand how it had been generated out of other outlooks that preceded it historically (this was a prominent theme in both Hegel and Nietzsche, for example). Yet another was an interest in the contribution that it could make to self-critique. For instance, the enthusiasm for the Otherness of the ancient Greeks that already began in Germany in the eighteenth century (e.g. Winckelmann, Schiller, and early Friedrich Schlegel) and then continued in the nineteenth (e.g. Hegel and Nietzsche) often involved using them as a sort of ideal that could serve as a weapon for criticizing features of modern German/European culture that the enthusiast disapproved of, such as Christian religion, Christian moral values, political despotism, or mediocre art. (This motive in certain cases led to a somewhat fancifully idealized picture of the ancient Greeks, it should be noted.)

  The present volume contains several contributions that discuss this topic of historical and cultural Otherness. Concerning its historical aspect, see especially John H. Zammito’s “Historicism” and Jessica N. Berry’s “The Burden of Antiquity.” Concerning its cultural aspect, see especially Michael Mack’s “The Other” and Douglas L. Berger’s “Receptions of Eastern Thought.”

  Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is the philosophy of education (in a broad sense). Four historical aspects of this subject are worth noting here. First, since Herder and Schiller in the late eighteenth century at the latest, German thought about education had focused not only on the activities of educational institutions such as schools and universities, but also on the morally educative function of literature (and art more generally). Second, already beginning with Kant’s War of the Faculties in the late eighteenth century, and then continuing in the nineteenth century with Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt, philosophers of the period developed an agenda of in effect deposing theology from its traditional position as the top faculty in the universities and substituting philosophy in that role (the amount of hostility to religion involved in this agenda varied, for example, from none in the case of Schleiermacher to quite a lot in the case of Humboldt). Third, during this period the ideal that education was supposed to realize increasingly became conceptualized as Bildung—a concept that has no exact English equivalent, but which in the classic version of it that Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated connoted, roughly, a person’s free self-realization as a distinctive individual in a manner that essentially depends on language and includes a balanced development of the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and physical faculties into a harmonious whole. Fourth, in 1809/10 Humboldt served as head of the Prussian ministry responsible for education and effected a sweeping reform of all levels of the educational system that made this ideal of Bildung central (in instituting this reform he also drew on the ideas of several other important contemporaries, including Pestalozzi at the level of primary education, F.A. Wolf at the level of the high school or Gymnasium, and Schleiermacher at the level of the university). The results of this reform are to a great extent still with us—not only in Germany but also in other countries (e.g. they arguably constitute the foundations of American university education). And in Germany the debate about the ideal of Bildung continues to this day.

  Two chapters in the present volume focus on the philosophy of education: Lina Steiner’s “Education” and Kristin Gjesdal’s “Bildung.”

  Another important part of nineteenth-century German philosophy is concerned with the relation between philosophy and science, or Wissenschaft (a German term that is famously less narrowly restricted to natural science and disciplines modeled on it than its English counterpart). The prestige of the sciences developed from strength to strength in nineteenth-century Germany. The Humboldt brothers can serve as exemplars of two important sides of that trend: during the early decades of the century Wilhelm von Humboldt participated in the development of linguistics (along with the Schlegel brothers, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, and others), history (along with the Romantics, Niebuhr, Savigny, Hegel, and others), and to some extent also philology (along with the Romantics, August Boeckh, and others); while Alexander von Humboldt returned to Berlin from extensive natural scientific travels around the world in 1827, delivered his famous and popular Kosmos lectures on the natural sciences there, and thereby both marked and contributed to a new rise in the prestige of the natural sciences. It would be an exaggeration to say that German philosophy’s concern with science had to wait for these developments (for example, Kant had already been profoundly concerned with mathematics, physics, and other natural sciences, Herder and Goethe had already shared a strong interest in the natural sciences as well, and Schelling had already invented the Philosophy of Nature during the last decade of the eighteenth century). However, it is fair to say that the breadth and the depth of philosophy’s concern with science increased in the nineteenth century. Some striking examples of this are the Philosophy of Nature of both Schelling and then Hegel; the rise of a new form of materialism grounded in sciences such as physics, biology, and neurophysiology (which led to a famous Materialismusstreit in mid-century); the ascent of theories of evolution in general and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species of 1859 in particular, which had a major impact on certain German philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche); intense debates concerning the difference between, and the proper methods of, natural sciences such as physics, on the one hand, and human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften, such as history, on the other (Droysen, Dilthey, Windelband, and Helmholtz all played large roles here); and developments in mathematics and formal logic that had deep philosophical implications (Frege was the towering figure here; his “logicism,” or attempt to reduce arithmetic to logic, was among other things a direct challenge to Kant’s conception of arithmetic as synthetic a priori, and although in Frege’s own and most of his critics’ estimation it ultimately failed, it produced revolutionary technical advances in logic as well as generating a deeper understanding of the element of truth in Kant’s position). But the new prestige of the sciences also affected philosophy even beyond those central cases. For example, Nietzsche, who went through a significant positivist phase, was influenced by materialism and theories of evolution and as a trained philologist also looked to philology as a paradigm of scientific rigor. And the
mature Marx conceived his own theories as scientific.