The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Hegel’s solution to these kinds of problems is hard to state in any economical way. His overall “logic” had three distinct “logics” within itself. In what he called the logic of “being,” Hegel argued that making the world intelligible to ourselves requires that we have a way of speaking of particulars, namely, by pointing them out (which requires us to distinguish them from each other on the basis of features they have), of classifying them, of making generalizations (such as “American Robins live on average 1.7 years”), or of counting them (“There are twenty Robins in the field”). Each of these types of judgments, when pushed, result in what looks like an infinite regress, which seems only to be stopped by invoking some kind of “given” in the series. It is a long and controversial story, but Hegel argues that one only really understands the series when one grasps the principle of the series, and his paradigmatic example comes from the way that judgments about infinite magnitudes at first seem to require something like infinitesimal numbers (larger than zero, less than any natural number) but which are actually resolved by Leibniz’s and Newton’s construction of the calculus which gives us the “principle” of such series. The calculus (among other things) shows us that we are not required to stop such infinite regresses by positing some “given” which functions as the ultimate and last member of such a series beyond which we cannot go.

  Because of such regresses and the various ways of stopping them, such judgments about “being” yield to judgments like “The tie only looks green in the store but is blue in normal sunlight” and “Deficiency in vitamin D may cause cognitive impairment in older adults,” which he calls judgments about “essences,” which themselves get caught in a different type of infinite regress. Such judgments explain an appearance by something else, which if it is to be a genuine explanation has to be both independent of the series and yet at the same time part of the series. The result is that one finds oneself oscillating between claiming that the determinateness of what is doing the explaining is independent of what is being explained only to then find that one grasps the determinateness of what is doing the explaining only by relating it to what it is supposed to explain. Each of the parts of the explanation seems to be both dependent and independent.

  Once again, once it is clear that what is at stake is explanatory adequacy, this back-and-forth oscillation among essences and appearances yields to a third and different type of judgment, examples of which are “What you just said does not follow from your premises,” or “That makes no sense within the current standards of physics.” If “being” and “essence” are about making sense of things in terms of the ways we must think things to be, then this third set of judgments has to do with “making sense about when we have made sense” of things.39 Ultimately, this requires us to make sense of making sense in the most general and necessary way possible, and that finally pushes us to the “Idea” in Hegel’s use of it.

  Hegel took this “logic” to be central to his system, since it showed that all of our judgmental activities push us into a conceptual statement about the “infinite” (since they all involve basic infinite regresses and how to stop them). His basic strategy in all his other philosophy was to see how such judgments about infinite regresses and failed attempts at grasping how to resolve them fit into a larger context, which involved denying any kind of “immediacy,” or givenness, as the proper stopping point in philosophical thought.

  It is nonetheless a key thesis of Hegel’s idealism that there are different Ideas in history, that they succeed each other in historical time, and although there is no grand metaphysical force pushing onward from one Idea to another, there is nonetheless a logic (or, more charitably put, something reasonably like a logic) that has turned out retrospectively to have been at work in the way such Ideas have succeeded each other. An Idea is thus the set of absolute commitments that make up a form of life—make up a Gestalt des Lebens, as Hegel calls it—and forms of life break down when their Idea turns out to be unlivable because of the strains and tensions in that form of life it stirs up in those who orient their lives in terms of such an Idea. Hegel’s idealism is thus also a kind of radical historicism that claims to avoid also being a relativism because, or so Hegel tried to show in various works, each of these Ideas can be seen to be a development of one single Idea, that of the unity of mind and world (but not that of the dependence of the world on the mind). Hegel even had a pithy summary of this Idea for the young students at his lectures (most of them in their teens and early twenties and not always as attentive as professors would like them to be). In the history of the world, there are three such big Ideas at work that are all developments of one Idea. For most of world history, it was accepted that one person was authorized by nature or the gods to rule over all others (Pharaoh, the emperor, etc.). That Idea broke down and left in its wake the Idea that some (aristocrats, the clergy, the most virtuous, etc.) were authorized by nature or God to rule over others. The breakdown of that Idea left in its wake the revolutionary Idea that nobody is by nature or the gods authorized to rule over anybody else, and that legitimate rule thus had to appeal to something else for its legitimation. That Idea came to its explosive and penultimate fulfillment in the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and it reached its penultimate philosophical fulfillment in the writings of Kant and Fichte. The one Idea at work in history that can be seen to be developing itself is that of humanity attempting to understand what it means to be minded agents aware of their own finitude—that is, as Hegel put it, of spirit’s striving to come to a full self-consciousness.

  Hegel’s vaunted dialectic played a fundamental role in this as the attempted articulation of how it is that an Idea (which is actualized as a determinate unity of mind and world in a form of life, or at the more abstract level as the logic itself of these movements, as a distinctive kind of theoretical take on mind and world) can, under the pressure of its own actualization, generate tensions and contradictions within those who inhabit it such that the form of life itself loses its grip on them, and as their form of life breaks down, they find themselves living within a new Idea whose shape takes on its contours in light of the experienced failure of its predecessor. As “Idea,” the space of reasons develops in history, and as it changes, so do we.

  In Schelling’s idealism, the world was lumbering its way in and by means of its own potencies (the basic powers of the absolute as they develop themselves) in order to come to a consciousness of itself in human knowers and in God. In Hegel’s idealism, human agents in determinate practices of reciprocally conferring epistemic, aesthetic, ethical and religious authority on each other find themselves within distinct forms of life, and in those distinct forms of life they also find that different things thereby show up for them as the Idea develops. In the modern world, natural science lets the world show up in a distinct way that reveals its indifference to human wishes, and constitutional, representative governments begin to embody the way in which agents now show up as neither masters nor servants but as instead having an equal standing.

  12.7 IDEALISM’S AFTERMATH

  After Hegel’s death, the struggle over whether Schelling’s or Hegel’s idealism was the definitive statement went into full throttle. (For rather contingent reasons having to do with academic influence, Fichte’s idealism more or less dropped out of contention.) For the most part, Hegel’s immediate successors—in particular, the leadenly boring G. A. Gabler, Hegel’s successor at Berlin—took him to be more or less a logicized version of Schelling. This Schellingianized Hegel was the Hegel Marx read, but Marx had the acumen to see through this and to pull Hegel back to Hegel’s own idealism before finally rejecting that form of idealism.

  Idealism pretty well died out as an active movement by the 1840s, although Hegel’s own rather contentious version of its history had come to be abstractly accepted. (In that account, Hegel portrayed himself as the endpoint of the development and all others as being fragmentary and unsatisfactory versions of idealism until he had fi
nished the project.) However, in the 1850s, another version of idealism became famous in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. (Schopenhauer’s fame was rather belated since he had published those ideas by 1817.) Schopenhauer basically interpreted Kant in exactly the way Kant did not want to be interpreted: the world of experience was an illusion, and reality was the world of things-in-themselves. The only thing we knew about that real world was revealed to us in our own willing, namely, that the real world was that of an inexorably moving will that ground its parts up as it went along and was also indifferent to us. Even our own individuation was merely a “representation” and our feeling of our freedom was an illusion. The only proper attitude to this was something like resignation and acceptance of death as the release from the illusion itself. Schopenhauer’s lively prose, his elevation of the arts to the highest point of human endeavor, and his own masterful presentation of a kind of gloomy central European version of Buddhism-seen-through-the-lenses-of-Kant made Schopenhauer into the most talked about philosopher of the 1850s and has ensured that his form of idealism—our world is not real, and the real world is something like that of a relentless, non-human process heading in its own, unknown and uncaring direction—has remained a competitor with the other forms of idealism in popular culture and artistic circles ever since.

  By the end of the century, various other forms of idealism began to appear, almost always under the form of “neo-this” or “neo-that.” The two most popular labels were those of “neo-Kantianism” and (neo)-Hegelianism. (For the most part, curiously, the neo-Hegelians were described as simply Hegelians.) For odd reasons, although the philosophical stance of the (neo-)Hegelians (especially in Britain) much more resembled Schelling’s idealism, Schelling as an equally contending figure seemed to drop out altogether. In Schelling’s place, Hegel, now taken as propounding a doctrine of the absolute as a spiritual entity developing itself in cosmic and human history, played a more central role. (No doubt Schelling’s relative neglect of any concrete philosophy of history and Hegel’s broad claims for history as the unfolding of freedom played a big role in people wanting to assume the title of “Hegelian.”) As the twentieth century rolled around, a revolt against the neo-Schellingians was taken to be a revolt against Hegelianism itself, and that revolt determined a large course of the development of twentieth-century philosophy in both Anglophone and European countries. As the twentieth century ended, a new and much less Schellingian Hegel had started to appear again on the philosophical scene.

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  * * *

  1 Kant’s own statement in Kant, I. (1929), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, p. 345 (A369): “By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves.”

  2 Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 29 (Bxxx).

  3 See Pinkard,
T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Pinkard, T. (2011), “The Social Conditions of Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), A. W. Wood and S. S. Hahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  4 Quoted in Pöggeler, O. (1993), Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes. Freiburg: Karl Alber, p. 32.

  5 See the discussion of this in Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Förster’s treatment compelled me to rethink some key parts of the narrative I gave of this development in Pinkard, T. P. (2002), German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  6 See the appreciative account and limited defense of Romanticism in Frank, M. (1997), “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; and in Larmore, C. E. (1996), The Romantic Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press.

  7 See Franks, P. W. (2005), All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German idealism. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Franks disputes the idea that Reinhold’s solution involved a regress. This accusation is usually attributed to G. E. Schulze in his review of Reinhold’s work. The real problem, so Franks argues, is that Reinhold’s view failed to distinguish transcendental from empirical representation, and thus begged the question. The relation between Reinhold’s and Kant’s views is also discussed in Pinkard, T. P. (2002). German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Förster, E. (2012), The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.