The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  The present volume contains a considerable number of chapters that focus on these topics. Concerning the Philosophy of Nature, see Alison Stone’s “Philosophy of Nature.” For discussion of materialism and the Materialismusstreit, see Kurt Bayertz’s “Materialism” and Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind.” Christian Spahn’s “Evolution” addresses theories of evolution. Concerning the methods of the natural and the human sciences, see Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences” and Rudolf A. Makkreel’s “Dilthey.” On mathematics and formal logic, see Graham Priest’s “Nineteenth-Century German Logic” and Patricia A. Blanchette’s “Frege.” For discussion of Marx and Nietzsche, see the chapters on them already cited.

  Finally, nineteenth-century German philosophy also made important contributions to virtually all areas of philosophy that are still distinguished in academic philosophy departments today, contributions which are in many cases not only of historical interest as strong influences on the ways in which these areas are now handled but also of great intrinsic value. Metaphysics and the opposition to it played a large role in the philosophy of the period: in the present volume Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer’s “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics” is devoted to this topic. Epistemology in general and skepticism in particular played a large role in this period as well: this is covered in the present volume in Ulrich Schlösser’s “Skepticism and Epistemology.” Philosophy of language was also already an important part of the philosophy of the period (as previously mentioned). In this volume it is covered mainly by Hans-Johann Glock’s “Philosophy of Language.” Philosophy of Mind was a pervasive and multi-facetted concern of the period as well: in this volume this subject is mainly covered by Barbara Gail Montero’s “Philosophy of Mind,” which focuses on several central aspects of it, including an influential model of consciousness that was developed by Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, the mind–body problem, materialism, and the unconscious. Formal logic and philosophical issues connected with it played an important role in this period as well. These topics are addressed in the present volume by Graham Priest’s “Nineteenth-Century German Logic” and Patricia A. Blanchette’s “Frege.” Philosophy of science also already played a significant role in this period and is covered in this volume by Frederick Gregory’s “Philosophy of Science” and Lydia Patton’s “Methodology of the Sciences.” Moral philosophy was another major preoccupation of the period, both in the form of the bold attacks on traditional morality and ethics that were launched by Marx and Nietzsche and in a more constructive mode. In the present volume this topic is covered by Paul Katsafanas’s “Ethics,” while the other chapters on Nietzsche and Marx also discuss their contributions to it. Political philosophy was also an important topic of the time, encompassing a wide variety of competing approaches: it is considered in this volume in Jean-François Kervégan’s “Political Philosophy.” Aesthetics played an important role in the philosophy of the period as well and is discussed in the present volume by Paul Guyer’s “Aesthetics.” Finally, philosophy of religion was another lively topic of the time, both among defenders of religion such as Kierkegaard (a Dane who is included here as a sort of honorary German because of his intimate connections to German philosophy) and among opponents of religion such as Marx and Nietzsche. In the present volume the chapters concerned with philosophy of religion include Michelle Kosch’s “Kierkegaard,” Todd Gooch’s “Atheism,” Michael N. Forster’s “Ideology,” and Katia Hay’s “Existentialism.”

  PHILOSOPHERS

  CHAPTER 1

  FICHTE (1762–1814)

  GÜNTER ZÖLLER

  1.1 THE FIRST SYSTEM OF FREEDOM

  THE philosophical work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) is political through and through. His thinking, no matter how abstract, arid, and seemingly removed from current affairs, reflected the dramatic developments of his age: from the French Revolution through the European Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte to the German national uprising in the Liberation Wars against the Corsican conqueror. The key concept of Fichte’s eminently political philosophy was freedom: political freedom from oppression and domination, but also cognitive freedom from error and illusion, cultural freedom from foreign influences and manipulation, moral freedom from the dictates of selfish interests, social freedom from economic inequality and injustice, religious freedom from superstition and blind faith, and philosophical freedom from prejudice and presumption.

  But the multiform freedom pursued by Fichte was not merely negative and geared to the removal of obstacles and hindrances. Freedom for Fichte meant primarily the positive freedom of self-determination, politically speaking of self-governance and the deliberate subjection to rules of one’s own making or consenting. Accordingly, freedom for Fichte essentially involved norms for the proper use of freedom—laws that guide its employment in the pursuit of ends set and means chosen. Moreover, for Fichte freedom understood as autonomy also served as the final end of human existence, something to be pursued for its own sake and not trumped by any other aim or object.

  Fichte inherited the focus on freedom as the motor and goal of all worthy human life and as the chief concern of sustained philosophical reflection from Kant, who had devoted his mature philosophy to delimiting the conceptual space for freedom in a world otherwise governed by natural causal laws and their thoroughgoing determination of things and events. In particular, Kant had placed the human being in a twofold relation to reality: one of subordination to the laws of nature and one of exemption from such laws and submission to the alternative legislation of freedom, chiefly manifest in the moral law governing self-determined agency.

  The price Kant had paid for this dual image of human existence was a two-layered account of reality. The order of nature, manifestly real and governed by strict physical laws, was downgraded to the level of appearances, which, while not only semblance or mere illusion, had no subsistence of their own and pointed beyond themselves to their grounding in an inscrutable substratum of reality (“things in themselves”). On Kant’s idealist account, the ordinary world of objects and persons in space and time reflected both the underlying but unknowable presence of the things (in) themselves and the shaping influence of universal human forms of knowing (space, time, and the categories, chief among them causality) that accounted for the lawful regularity of the spatio-temporal world.

  Having been released from the binding laws of physical reality, the realm of things in themselves received its non-cognitive, practical interpretation in Kant’s moral philosophy, where it served as the sphere for the grounds and bounds of human rational agency. Kant envisioned the conceptual space of freedom as a sphere of normative directions and constraints combining the negative freedom from natural determination with the formal freedom of choice and the positive freedom of rational self-determination.

  Fichte followed Kant closely in the idealist interpretation of the natural world as involving mere, though real, representations and in the correlation of free agency with an underlying stratum of reality outside of space, time, and the natural causal order—a realm of radical freedom governed by non-natural, “moral” laws that involved norms rather than facts and commands (“ought”) rather than descriptions (“is”). But he also sought to outdo Kant in extending the scope of the cognitive forms for the shaping of reality and in minimizing the role of the inscrutable things in themselves, which he reduced to formal limiting points providing resistance to human self-induced, spontaneous activity by holding the latter “in check.”

  Most importantly, Fichte aimed at expanding the foundational function of freedom, which Kant had limited to the moral world order, to include the physical world, now viewed as nothing but the natural sphere for the exercise of supra-natural freedom. Fichte’s declared aim was to institute freedom as a truly universal and unitary principle that would provide the ultimate grounding for both worlds and provide for their integration by way of reciprocal interaction, with the natural world materially informing the moral order, and the
moral order normatively enhancing the natural world.

  In the process, Fichte sought to turn philosophy, which in Kant had been divided into the theoretical philosophy of nature and the practical philosophy of freedom, into an all-encompassing “system of freedom,” and the first such system at that. In a closely related move, Fichte set out to establish reason, which in Kant had been divided into the theoretical reason involved in the determination of objects and the practical reason involved in the determination of the will, as the unitary source and ultimate resource for normative claims of all kinds. Freedom, which for Kant had been the “cap stone” in the architecture of reason, was to become the common ground and unitary foundation for each and all of the integrated parts of the philosophical system.

  For Fichte the unity of theoretical and practical reason, which already had been envisioned by Kant but instead located by him in an original dimension beyond human reach or grasp and in a final perspective aiming at an unreachable goal, was to find concrete realization in the convergence of theory and practice, of nature and freedom, of self and world. The basic modes of human spontaneous accomplishment, knowing and doing, previously correlated and compared but not actually integrated, were to be traced to a basic form or condition of self-determined and self-governed, “free” human activity.

  Fichte used or coined various terms to describe the elusive ground of human reason in order to lend expression to its unitary but complexly structured and dynamically constituted character and its unique modality of freedom. Those terms—chiefly among them “positing” (setzen), “factual act” or “(f)act” (Tathandlung), and “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung)—were designed to convey the “original duplicity” of cognition and volition in a grounding dimension or a foundational layer preparing subsequent differentiation as much as transcending it.

  The overall practical orientation of Fichte’s intended first-ever system of freedom brought with it the constitutive character of willing in Fichte. For Fichte the primary reality was volitional—directly so in the immediate practical consciousness of the motives, objectives and norms of one’s willing, and indirectly so in the mediated theoretical consciousness of the objects and products of willed action. At points Fichte even considered willing to be the only reality and all other seemingly real entities, including the subjects doing the willing and the objects willed, to be nothing but projections and vehicles for the conveyance of willing.

  The outlook on the world that resulted from Fichte’s system of freedom and the primacy it granted to willing was that of a natural world fit and designed to be shaped by human work and of a socio-cultural (“moral”) world suited and subject to change and innovation under the guiding principle of universal freedom. For Fichte the material world in general and human bodily existence in particular were but the sphere and instrument, respectively, for the material manifestation of a spontaneous mental activity attributable to the reign of “spirit” over matter and of minds over things.

  Its spiritual origin combined with its somatic and social orientation made the system of freedom envisioned by Fichte unsuitable for conventional presentation and instruction. Rather than resulting in a body of philosophical doctrines to be transmitted by the spoken or written word, Fichte intended his public philosophical thinking to inspire his readers and listeners to their own free thinking about the grounds and bounds of freedom and to draw the consequences therefrom for their own lives. Taking up the principle of enlightenment, as formulated by Kant, namely, to think for oneself, Fichte challenged the intellectual public to make freedom and the rational self-determination it entailed the guiding principle of each and everyone’s thinking and doing.

  1.2 THE TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE

  The system of freedom projected by Fichte early on did not come to fruition all at once and completely. Fichte spent his entire professional life from 1793 through 1814 developing, revising, and publicizing the system-to-be, producing over a dozen versions of it, all but the very first of which never were published during his lifetime. The elusive character of the system of freedom was chiefly due to its ambitious aim of lending formal rigor and scientific method to the presentation of a subject matter that essentially eluded treatment in fixed concepts and concise doctrines, namely the status and function of the unconditioned and infinite—freedom—in finite, conditioned life.

  In its basic outlook Fichte’s attempted scientific system of freedom followed Kant’s project of a transcendental philosophy intent and able to provide the necessary conditions for the very possibility of the experience of objects in space and time. By distinguishing between the unlimited, non-empirical (“a priori”) origin of transcendental principles and their limited, empirical (“a posteriori”) use, Kant had sought to establish a “metaphysics of experience” (H. J. Paton) that combined the empiricist concern with the sensory bounds of reason with the rationalist focus on a kind of knowledge that was to be valid independent of experience.

  Fichte set out to continue Kant’s transcendental project of a non-empirical meta-knowledge about the conditions and limits of possible knowledge and of the possible objects of knowledge. He renamed transcendental philosophy “Wissenschaftslehre,” alternatively translated as “doctrine of science” and “science of knowledge,” in order to indicate the scientific status of philosophy as the foundational discipline for cognitive claims of all kinds. Unlike Kant, who had limited transcendental philosophy to theoretical philosophy concerned with the cognition of what is, Fichte was intent on including practical philosophy, specifically moral philosophy, in the scope of the meta-science that philosophy was to be, even according it the prime position in the set-up of the system.

  Fichte also followed Kant—and some early post-Kantians—closely in basing the transcendental-scientific system of freedom on a set of principles inspired by the Kantian first principle of apperception that involved the spontaneous generation of the basic structure of thinking, expressed in the universal proto-thought, “I think.” In order to render the Kantian principle of apperception truly universal, Fichte expanded its scope to include the grounding of all kinds of cognition, volition, and feeling. In the process, he replaced the specific terms, “thinking” and “intuiting,” with the generic term, “positing,” designed to convey the spontaneous pre-conscious mental activity underlying all conscious mental acts and any (self-)consciousness of them. Fichte also followed Kant in designating the alleged agency manifesting itself in conscious as well as pre-conscious mental acts with the nominalized pronoun of the first person, “the I.”

  For Fichte the I served not only as the origin and basic form of self-awareness of self-consciousness but also as the basis of all consciousness of objects and, by extension, of all objects of such consciousness. In particular, Fichte sought to trace the very fact of objects being given in experience to the original introduction—by the actively producing, “positing” I—of a produced, “posited” not-I subject to further differentiation and determination into an entire world of objects. Fichte’s covering term for the I in its dual function for the constitution of self-consciousness (subjectivity) and the constitution of the consciousness of objects (objectivity) was “subject-object” or “subject-objectivity.”

  When the first (and only) published version of the Wissenschaftslehre—presented as “Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre” (1794/95)—met with a hostile and polemic reception targeting the alleged solipsism and subjective idealism of the reformed transcendental philosophy, Fichte attempted a new presentation (Wissenschaftslehre “nova methodo”), in which he integrated the previously separate foundational, theoretical, and practical parts of his first philosophy into a continuing philosophical narrative (“history of self-consciousness”) about the emergence of self- and world-awareness on the part of a practically intelligent being whose will is formally free in its choice but materially bound by the theoretical and practical norms of correct cognition and right conduct. Chief among the norms of intelligent will
ing were the principles of law and ethics, to both of which Fichte devoted substantial book publications that lent a good measure of specificity and concreteness to the more general and abstract foundations of transcendental philosophy he had provided previously. Other planned material extensions of the system of philosophy into the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of religion remained unrealized or merely sketched.

  1.3 THE STATE OF RIGHT

  Fichte’s philosophy of law appeared, under the title Foundations of Natural Right, in 1796/97, in advance of Kant’s corresponding work, the “Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right” from the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Fichte’s early philosophy of law differed considerably from Kant’s slightly later work, which was to treat law together with ethics as integral parts of moral philosophy subject to the moral law and based on the categorical imperative of right that unconditionally constrained everyone to limit the outward use of their own freedom to its compatibility with the corresponding freedom of everyone else. By contrast, Fichte—drawing on the early modern tradition of the social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)—treated law as an object of prudential considerations based on the enlightened self-interest that individuals have in an association that affords them the security from each other and the solidarity with each other deemed essential for the productive pursuit of their own ends.

  The move from a specifically moral to a decidedly political conception of right in general and of legal obligation and lawful constraint in particular marked a radical break, on Fichte’s part, with the tradition of natural law that had tied the juridical sphere to moral norms allegedly based in the nature of things, including human nature. Still, Fichte shared the intent of natural law to subject positive, historically actual law to supra-positive and trans-historical conditions in order to assure the freedom of law from arbitrary choice based on the partial interests of power and domination. But unlike the cosmological or theological grounding of traditional natural law in a world order or a divine will, law in Fichte—to the extent that it was natural as opposed to historical, universal as opposed to particular, and necessary as opposed to contingent—was founded upon the requirements of self-conscious intelligent agency. Fichte extended his transcendental argumentation to the legal and political sphere, claiming that the establishment of a juridico-political order in general and of a liberal such order in particular was a necessary condition for the emergence and flourishing of fully formed human individuals.