The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Guyer, Paul. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  Guyer, Paul. “Back to Truth: Knowledge and Pleasure in the Aesthetics of Schopenhauer,” in Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway, editors, Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 11–25.

  Guyer, Paul. “The End of Art and the Interpretation of Geist,” in Dina Emundts, editor, Self, World, and Art: Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2013, pp. 283–306.

  Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

  Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Houlgate, Stephen, editor. Hegel and the Arts. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

  Jacquette, Dale, editor. Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  Jähnig, Dieter. Schelling: Die Kunst in der Philosophie, 2 vols. Pfüllingen: Neske, 1966-69.

  Lotze, Hermann. Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland. Munich: Cotta, 1868.

  Makkreel, Rudolf A. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

  Martin, Nicholas. Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

  Müller-Vollmer, Kurt. Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Literature: A Study of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Poetik. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

  Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

  Neill, Alex and Christopher Janaway, editors. Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

  Nivelle, Armand. Kunst- und Dichtungstheorien zwischen Aufklärung und Klassik. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1960.

  Oelmüller, Willi. Friedrich Theodor Vischer und das Problem der nachhegelschen Ästhetik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959.

  Pillow, Kirk. Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

  Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Podro, Michael. The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982.

  Porter, James I. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

  Ridley, Aaron. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Art. London: Routledge, 2007.

  Rutter, Benjamin. Hegel on the Modern Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

  Scheer, Brigitte. “Zur Theorie des Häßlichen bei Karl Rosenkranz,” in Heiner Klemme, Michael Pauen, and Marie-Luise Raters, editors, Im Schatten des Schönen: Die Ästhetik des Häßlichen in historischen Ansätzen und aktuellen Debatten. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2006, pp. 141–56.

  Sommer, Robert. Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik von Wolff-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller. Würzburg: Stahel, 1892.

  Young, Julian. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

  * * *

  1 This chapter is based on my treatment of nineteenth-century German aesthetics in A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume II: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Parts One and Three.

  2 See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, edited by Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), translated as Reflections on Poetry: A.G. Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, by Karl Aschenbrenner and W. B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), §CXVI.

  3 Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 9, 1451b5–6.

  4 Mendelssohn first developed his views in the Letters on Sentiments of 1755 and the essay on “The Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences” of 1757, which were then republished with the accompanying “Rhapsody” in his Philosophical Writings of 1761; Kames’s enduringly influential Elements of Criticism appeared in the following year, 1762. While Mendelssohn’s essays on aesthetics were not translated into English until 1997, Kames’s Elements had been translated into German immediately, in 1763, and were well-known until the end of the century, certainly to both Kant and Friedrich Schiller.

  5 For the eighteenth-century background to nineteenth-century German philosophy, see Beiser 2009, Buchenau 2013, Guyer 2014, vol. I, Hammermeister 2002, Lotze 1868, Nivelle 1960, and Sommer 1892.

  6 See Guyer 2003.

  7 For my interpretation of Kant’s concept of adherent beauty, see Guyer 2005, chapters 4 and 5, and Guyer 1997, chapter 12.

  8 For further discussion, see Guyer 2005, chapter 3.

  9 Santayana 1955, p. 7.

  10 On the “early Romantics,” see especially Frank 1989, Beiser 2003, and Pinkard 2002.

  11 For interpretations of Schelling’s philosophy of art, see Jähnig 1966–9, Frank 1989, lectures 9–13, Bowie 1993, chapter 3, and Bowie 2003, chapter 4.

  12 See also Schelling 2007, a translation on material from the lectures that Schelling gave following his late-life appointment in Berlin in 1841.

  13 Works specifically devoted to Schopenhauer’s aesthetics include Jacquette 1996, which contains Guyer 1996; Baum and Birnbacher 2005; and Neill and Janaway 2009, where Guyer 2009 appears.

  14 Hotho’s edition, first published in 1835, is much bigger than any of the surviving transcriptions from the courses of 1820–1, 1823, 1826, and 1828–9, including his own transcription of 1823, from which he worked, so his edition must be considerably padded. But (contrary to what some have argued), the recent publication of the original classroom transcriptions make it clear that Hotho’s edition does not distort Hegel’s original ideas in any significant way. The standard translation of Hotho’s edition is Hegel 1975. The original texts are available as Hegel 1995, Hegel 2003, and Hegel 2004.

  The literature on Hegel’s aesthetics is extensive, see Bungay 1987, Pillow 2000, Gethmann-Siefert 2005, Rutter 2010, and Houlgate (editor) 2007. See also Guyer 2013.

  15 On Hegel’s influence on the historiography of art, see Podro 1982.

  16 Schleiermacher lectured on aesthetics in 1819, before Hegel gave his first course in Berlin, and again in 1825 and 1832–3, one year after Hegel’s death and a year before his own. Like Hegel’s, his lectures were published only posthumously, first in 1842, as Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, most recently as Schleiermacher 1984. For commentary see Bowie 2003 and Gjesdal 2009.

  17 Schleiermacher’s claim that art clarifies emotion thus anticipates the well-known argument of R. G. Collingwood, a century later, that it does exactly that; see Collingwood 1938.

  18 On Rosenkranz, see Scheer 2006.

  19 For monographs on Vischer, see Oelmüller 1959 and Göbel 1983.

  20 See Vischer 1898.

  21 On Nietzsche’s aesthetics, see Nehamas 1985, Young 1992, Martin 1996, and Ridley 2007.

  22 See Schiller 1967.

  23 For the argument that Nietzsche is already turning away from Schopenhauerian values in The Birth of Tragedy in spite of its Schopenhauerian metaphysics, see Porter 2000.

  24 See Spencer 1895, §§533–9, pp. 627–48.

  25 See Lee 1913 and Lee and Anstruther-Thomson 1912.

  26 Vischer 1994.

  27 The main work on Dilthey remains Makkreel 1975; he touches upon Dilthey’s aesthetics in Part Four. See also Müller-Vollmer 1963.

  CHAPTER 26

  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

  JEAN-FRANçOIS KERVéGAN

  26.1 INTRODUCTION

  THE following judgement can be found in a book on Hegel: ‘no other philosophy was a philosophy of Revolution to the same degree as that of Hegel’.1 One could go further: all German political philosophy in the ‘long nineteenth century’ (E. Hobsbawm) attem
pted to respond to the challenge thrown down by the Revolution; a revolution which reached far beyond French borders, provoking the political restructuring of the entire European continent. The Revolution, conceived as an overturning of the fundamental order of society, constituted an unprecedented rupture with established conceptions of human society.2 What is more, the radical turn taken by the Revolution during the period of the Terror caused it to lose many of the sympathies it had gained. European public opinion was shocked by the execution of Louis XVI, particularly in Germany, where respect for the authority in place (Obrigkeit) had an almost sacred value. Kant himself, despite his sympathy for the principles of 1789, described that execution as ‘a crime that remains forever’, precisely because the form it adopted was one of legality.3 Finally, the fact that the French Revolution was presented as the realization of principles not drawn up after the fact—as was the case for the American Revolution with the Federalist Papers—but existing from the very outset, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen; this fact provoked curiosity and distrust. As Hegel says, the French Revolution was the work of ‘men of principle’ for whom ‘national legislation…essentially extends no further than those droits de l’homme et du citoyen which were prefixed to the earlier French constitutions’.4 Founded on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment thinkers, the French Revolution was perceived by many German thinkers as not just a political but a philosophical event; an event on which they had to take a position. In 1830, although Hegel had somewhat curbed the youthful enthusiasm that led him along with Hölderlin and Schelling to plant a tree of liberty in the courtyard of the Protestant Seminary at Tübingen, he nevertheless proclaimed in front of all of his students the meaning of that moment for all ‘thinking beings’ when ‘the conception, the Idea of right asserted its authority all at once’. It was a question of revolution in the literal sense of the term, since men undertook to base their actions on thought (the thought of right), in other words, to walk on their heads.5 Many German philosophers (but not all) considered the French Revolution as their business—as philosophical business. For them, the vocation of German philosophy was to think what the French had done: to establish the principles of a free and just political and legal order. But then the following question arose: ‘why was it the French alone, and not the Germans, who set about realizing [freedom]?’6 Marx’s ironic response was that the Germans are only good in theory, not in practice! Such an answer supposes the overturning of the classical hierarchy between theory and practice maintained by German idealism, with the notable exception of Fichte.7

  Evidently not every German philosopher was so enthusiastic. From Rehberg to Spengler, there is a long list of German critics of ‘French ideas’, the latter sometimes being associated with English liberalism.8 Nevertheless, even for the most hostile, the Revolution remained an unavoidable obstacle. To understand that event, what followed it, and what it perhaps prevented from occurring was, for friends as for adversaries, a central task of political philosophy. Philosophy had to come to terms with the Revolution: which did not imply that it had to itself become revolutionary.

  26.2 GERMAN IDEALISM: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL

  These three major authors share a certain number of preoccupations. First of all, they all see the need to separate law from morality. Reflection on the French Revolution contributes to this task in that the Revolution was driven by the idea of founding politics on a moral basis. Hegel confirms this when he says of Robespierre: ‘it may be said that with this man virtue was an earnest matter’.9 But not only did the invocation of morality fail to prevent the tragic course of the revolution, it precipitated it. It is thus quite important to avoid any confusion between law (which regulates the external coexistence of individuals) and morality (which provides norms for actions to subjects). For Kant, ‘the problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils’, since it is a juridical problem and not a moral problem.10 Fichte proclaimed that the doctrine of law should not be a chapter of morality, but ‘a separate science standing on its own’.11 In Hegel’s thinking it is the task of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) to ‘reconcile’ abstract law and morality (Moralität), whose exigencies can be contradictory.

  Another phenomenon drew the attention of classical German philosophy: the modern disassociation of the social and the political or, in Hegel’s terms (which are then subverted by Marx), of bourgeois civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) and the state. Contrary to the koinonia politikè, whose definition was strictly political (‘the city is the citizens’ Aristotle says), modern civil society is in part ruled by unplanned economic mechanisms (Adam Smith’s famous ‘invisible hand’). Henceforth civil society cannot and must not be confused with the state. However, it does need to be politically structured in order to avoid succumbing to its own contradictions. The logic of the market economy isolates individuals, it de facto encourages asocial behaviour; but it also makes individuals dependent on each other and develops the socialization of the satisfaction of needs and the division of labour on an ever-increasing scale (such is ‘globalization’, of which Hegel was one of the first commentators). Thus, in order to contain the contradictions of ‘bourgeois’ society, vigorous state intervention is required, and through such intervention the existence of the state is justified anew. For Fichte and Hegel, only the state is capable of offering a positive outcome for the dialectic of the universal and the particular that is found at the heart of the modern world. It is on this point that Schelling, Marx, and then Nietzsche will part company from them.

  At the heart of Kant’s political philosophy one finds the concept of a republic, such as presented in Towards Perpetual Peace (1795). This conception, elaborated during the French Revolution, develops a new response to the central problem of political philosophy as posed by Hobbes: how can ‘political obligation’ be founded within a ‘market regime’?12 How can political subordination be justified when the very existence of the community can no longer be considered as ‘natural’ (Aristotle) and is based on mechanisms that in part escape the state’s grasp? Hobbes’ response is to show that ‘one must exit the state of nature’ at the price of subordination to a central authority.13 Locke founds the same necessity—exiting the state of nature—on the absence in the state of nature of an ‘established, settled, known law’ and of a ‘known and indifferent judge’.14 Rousseau displays the possibility of a ‘form of association…by means of which, each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before’.15 Yet these responses seemed unsatisfactory. For Kant it is the articulation of private law and public law that should lie at the foundation of the constitutional order that is to be instituted. Contrary to Hobbes, he does not consider the state of nature as a non-juridical situation: relationships between individuals are subject to the norms of private law, relative to what is ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. Consequently the state of nature is already (partially) social.16 But this state of private law is ‘provisional’ (precarious) because it depends on the good will of each; it must therefore be rendered ‘conclusive’.17 This occurs through the establishment of a ‘condition of public law’; in other words, a state that will guarantee the stability of relationships based on private law.18 The state is thus the (incomplete) justification of a social order which, in order to be effective and stable, must receive the sanction of public law, the law which fixes constitutional principles; in other words, ‘of a state as such, that is, of the state in idea, as it ought to be in accordance with pure principles of law’.19 These are the principles that determine the relations between the legislative, executive and judiciary powers.

  In this construction, which at first sight is not particularly original, two points should retain our attention. First of all, Kant affirms—and at the time this was not in the least obvious—that ‘legislative authority can belong only to the united will of the people.’20 But the impact of this acceptance of the principle of popular sove
reignty is limited, since the people are not capable themselves of expressing this will that is ‘objectively’ theirs. Only active citizens (an idea borrowed from Sièyes) are able to participate in the elaboration of the sovereign universal will. Second, Kant describes the rational constitution as a ‘republican constitution’, which was quite daring for the epoch. Towards Perpetual Peace lays out this conception of the republic in detail.21 The most original idea is that the pertinent criterion for the evaluation of political forms is not the classical typology of constitutions, but the manner of government. It is less a matter of defining the ‘best regime’ than of elaborating the rules of good government that then apply to all forms of government. For the classic distinction between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, Kant substitutes the opposition between republicanism and despotism. He makes the representation of the people and the separation of powers into the decisive criteria of the ‘republican’ manner of government, which prefigures future theories of the state of law (Rechtsstaat). According to Kant—this is the lesson he draws from the failure of the French revolution—democracy is despotic by nature; it is thus not ‘republican’ whilst constitutional monarchy is. But the main point is that Kant changed the way in which philosophy approached the question of politics. This was also signalled by his conception of international law as founded on a federation of free states, and as destined to establish peace by means of law, and by his project of a ‘cosmopolitan law’ opening up, despite the unavoidable plurality of states, the perspective of a peaceful worldwide civil society.22

  Fichte’s adhesion to the principles of the French Revolution was less circumspect than that of Kant. He also thought that the Revolution was more than just a French affair: this ‘rich tableau based on a grand principle: the right and the dignity of men…interests the whole of humanity’.23 But Fichte draws far more daring consequences. He proclaims the unconditional right of peoples to transform the political order of things if certain fundamental principles (the rights of man) are not respected. In such a case—Locke already emphasized this—it is not the people who rebel against their monarch, it is rather the monarch, who, in dissolving the pact upon which political subordination is founded, declares war on his own people and obliges them to defend themselves. The validity of a pact depends upon both parties executing the tasks they engaged to perform. Therefore, ‘if one of the two does not want to keep his word, there is no concluded contract.’24 Moreover, to justify the right to revolt, Fichte formulates an argument that prefigures the Hegelian distinction between society and the state. The notion of society is much larger than that of political society: men can maintain regulated relationships without engaging in a ‘civil contract’ (a social contract in normal terminology).25 Consequently, there are rights—the rights of man, and not of the citizen—that are anterior and superior to those instituted by the civil contract, and the state has no right to violate them. Further, ‘everyone has the perfect right to quit the state’ and to form with others a new state on the basis of a new contract.26 Political obligation is no more than relative.