Its aim is neither scientific knowledge nor right action, but rather the contemplation of the individual object for its own sake, as it is in itself, and in the light of the particular sensuous experience that it generates. Nevertheless, aesthetic contemplation is not the same as animal enjoyment. It is a rational pursuit, and issues in judgements which, while they can never be supported by objective or universal principles, do lay claim to objectivity. This claim is unavoidable. For to the extent that our enjoyment of something stems from our rational nature, so do we feel that beings similarly constituted ought to share in it, and so do we look in the object for the grounds that will persuade them to enjoy it too. This pursuit of objectivity, while hopeless, is inevitable. It is indispensable to aesthetic enjoyment, which is founded in critical understanding and never reducible to mere sensuous indulgence.
Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement was complex, and obscurely worked out. While the third Critique is undeniably the most important work of aesthetics to have been produced since Aristotle, it was the product of a mind exhausted by its labours, still pregnant with unformed thoughts, but unable to give to them their full elaboration. For example, Kant suggests, in a famous phrase, that the aesthetic judgement seeks in nature and in art for ‘purposiveness without purpose’. Here he gestures not only towards a theory of aesthetics, but also towards a larger vision, which shows the role of aesthetic judgement in intellectual enquiry as a whole. Aesthetic judgement is given an indispensable place in forming a picture of the relation of the human mind to the world of experience. It was left to other thinkers, notably to Schiller, to give elaboration to this thought, and in doing so to lay the foundations of a philosophy of art that has been the most influential in intellectual history.
Transcendental idealism
The Critique of Judgement argues, then, not for the objective validity of aesthetic values, but for the fact that we must think of them as objectively valid. This immediately leads us to ask how Kant can distinguish in general between the actual objectivity of a mode of thought and the innate need that we feel to construe it as though it were objective. Consider moral judgements (understood in the Kantian way, so that the intimation of God and immortality is an immovable part of moral understanding). Is it the case that Kant has argued for their objectivity?
Or has he merely argued that we must treat moral judgements as though they were objective? Many philosophers who accept the second thesis (believing, indeed, that this ‘pressure of reason’ is what is distinctive of the moral point of view) nevertheless reject the first: the thesis of the objectivity of morals.
As I have already suggested, this doubt as to the nature and scope of Kant’s enterprise can be extended even into the first Critique. Has he argued for the actual objectivity of science, and for the existence of objects that may be other than they seem? Or has he merely advanced a thesis concerning human mental capacities, the thesis that we are constrained to think as though this were true? To put it in more idealistic terms: has he argued simply that we impose (through the organising principles of the understanding) an order on our experience which we then interpret in the familiar terms of object, cause, space and time? Modern philosophers have tended to interpret Kant as arguing for the actual objectivity of science. The world is as science describes it to be. We ourselves are no more than observers of it, whose peculiarities are not to be discovered by introspection, but rather by adopting the point of view of the objective world of which we form a part. Kant’s immediate successors, however, interpreted him differently. To them he had not so much laid the foundations of a true objectivity as explored the reaches of subjectivity. Far from demoting the first person from the privileged place which it had, until then, assumed in epistemology, he had elevated it to the single principle not only of epistemology but of metaphysics itself.
Three features of Kant’s philosophy give grounds for this interpretation. First, there is his own description of the philosophy of the first Critique as ‘transcendental idealism’. Secondly, Kant, in referring to the capacities of the human mind, speaks always of ‘our’ experience, ‘our’ understanding, ‘our’ concepts, ‘our’ will, etc., leaving open the crucial question whether this ‘our’ is to be taken in a general sense. Does it mean all human beings conceived impartially? Or is it to be interpreted in the specific sense of idealism, in which it refers to the abstract subject, the ‘I’ that is engaged in the intellectual construction of a ‘world’? This ambiguity is crucial, since, depending on its interpretation, we seem drawn either towards an impersonal metaphysics, or towards a highly solipsistic epistemology. Finally there is the confusion introduced by the second Critique, which seems to reject the view that the world of ‘phenomena’ is the actual world, within which the distinction between appearance and reality must be drawn, and asserts in its place the view that all ‘phenomena’ are mere appearance, with the reality consisting in the thing-in-itself that lies behind it. At the same time it is argued that the thing-in-itself is knowable after all, through the postulates of practical reason.
Fichte, Schiller and Schelling
Kant’s immediate followers adopted the framework and the language of transcendental idealism, the principal achievement of which, they believed, was to have demoted the thing-in-itself from its metaphysical eminence, and elevated the self and its mental faculties in place of it. Henceforth the first study of philosophy was to be the ‘faculties’—known by their Kantian names as intuition, understanding, reason, judgement, and so on—through which the self orders the world of appearance, and knows self and world together. The ground of all that exists is the subject of consciousness—unknowable to the understanding, but revealed to practical reason as freedom and will.
But if the self is the source of knowledge, something has been left unexplained. How can a merely subjective entity, beyond the reach of concepts, construct an objective world and endow it with the order of space, time and causality? This is the question that motivated the tradition known on the Continent as ‘classical German philosophy’, but which could be more accurately described as ‘romantic German philosophy’, not only for its association with romantic literature, but also on account of its manifest preference for lofty visions over valid arguments. The tradition was founded by Fichte and Schelling, and I shall conclude this chapter with a brief summary of their leading ideas, in order to show the profound impact on German philosophy of the Kantian agenda.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was appointed (thanks to the influence of Goethe and Schiller) to the chair of philosophy in Jena at the age of 32. His lectures were immensely popular, and he published them in 1794. Known as the Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge), they were reworked in later editions, and were prefaced by Fichte with the claim that ‘my system is nothing other than the Kantian’. According to Fichte, Kant had shown that there are but two possible philosophies: idealism and dogmatism. The idealist looks for the explanation of experience in intelligence, the dogmatist in the ‘thing-in-itself’. Kant had shown that idealism can explain everything that dogmatism explains, while making no assumptions beyond the reach of observation. The dispute between the two concerns whether ‘the independence of the thing should be sacrificed to that of the self, or, conversely, the independence of the self to that of the thing’. The starting-point of idealist philosophy is therefore the self (das Ich).
The task of such a philosophy is to discover the ‘absolutely unconditioned first principle of human knowledge’. Logicians offer an instance of necessary and indisputable truth in the law of identity: A = A. But even in that law something is presupposed that we have yet to justify, namely the existence of A. I can advance to the truth of A = A, once A has been ‘posited’ as an object of thought. But what justifies me in positing A? There is no answer. Only if we can find something that is posited in the act of thinking itself will we arrive at a self-justifying basis for our claims to knowledge. This thing that is posited absolutely is the I; for when the self is the object o
f thought, that which is ‘posited’ is identical with that which ‘posits’. In the statement that I = I we have therefore reached bedrock. Here is a necessary truth that presupposes nothing. The self-positing of the self is the true ground of the law of identity, and hence of logic itself.
To this first principle of knowledge, which he calls the principle of identity, Fichte adds a second. The positing of the self is also a positing of the not-self. For what I posit is always an object of knowledge, and an object is not a subject. That which comes before my intuition in the act of self-knowledge is intuited as not-self. This is the principle of counter-positing (or opposition). From which, in conjunction with the first principle, a third can be derived, namely, that the not-self is divisible in thought and opposed to a ‘divisible self. This third principle (the ‘grounding principle’) is supposedly derived by a ‘synthesis’ of the other two. It is the ground of transcendental philosophy, which explores the ‘division’ of the self by concepts, whereby the world is constituted as an object of knowledge.
The self is ‘determined’ or ‘limited’ by the not-self, which in turn is limited by the self. It is as though self-consciousness were traversed by a movable barrier: whatever lies in the not-self has been transferred there from the self. But since the origin of both self and not-self is the act of self-positing, nothing on either side of the barrier is anything, in the last analysis, but self. In the not-self, however, the self is passive. There is no contradiction in bringing this passive object under such concepts as space, time and causality, so situating it in the natural order. As subject, on the other hand, the self is active, spontaneously positing the objects of knowledge. The self is therefore free, since the concepts of the natural world (including causality) apply only to that which is posited as object, and not to the positing subject.
All activity in the not-self (including that which we should describe as causation) is transferred there from the self. But transference of activity is also an ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung) of the self in the not-self, and a determination of the self by the not-self. This self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) is the realisation of freedom, since the not-self that determines me is only the self made objective in the act of self-awareness.
Fichte’s philosophy rests not so much in argument as in impetuous explosions of jargon, in which that fabricated verb ‘to posit’ (setzen) kaleidoscopes into a thousand self-reflecting images. Schopenhauer described Fichte as ‘the father of sham philosophy, of the underhand method that by ambiguity in the use of words, incomprehensible talk and sophisms, tries to...befool those eager to learn’. This harsh judgement (characteristic of its author) may be deserved; but it does nothing to deny Fichte’s enormous influence: an influence that can be seen in the writings of Schopenhauer himself. For what Fichte bequeathed to his successors was not an argument at all, but a drama, the outlines of which may be summarised thus:
Underlying knowledge is the free and self-producing subject. The destiny of the subject is to know itself by ‘determining’ itself, and thereby to realise its freedom in an objective world. This great adventure is possible only through the object, which the subject posits, but to which it stands opposed as its negation. The relation between subject and object is dialectical— thesis meets antithesis, whence a synthesis (knowledge) emerges. Every venture outwards is also an alienation of the self, which achieves freedom and self-knowledge only after a long toil of self-sundering. The self emerges at last in possession of a ‘realised’ self-consciousness, which is also consciousness of an objective order. The ‘process’ of self-determination does not occur in time, since time is one of its products: indeed the order of events in time is the reverse of their order in ‘logic’.
That drama, give or take a few details, remains unchanged in Schelling and Hegel, and remnants of it survive through Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Marx right down to Heidegger. What it lacks in cogency it amply supplies in charm, and even today its mesmerising imagery infects the language and the agenda of Continental philosophy.
But there was another input, besides Fichte’s drama, into the post-Kantian agenda. This was the aesthetic theory of Kant’s third Critique, as refined and polished by the poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805). In a series of Letters on Aesthetic Education (1794-1795) Schiller gave special content to the Kantian view of the aesthetic sense as ‘disinterested’. While Kant had paid little attention to art, Schiller attempted to describe it as the highest of man’s activities. Art is the activity in which, being ‘disinterested’, man is at once wholly free and wholly at rest. Art is a form of ‘play’. It therefore has a privileged place, not only in human self-knowledge (of which it forms the highest example) but in the life of the state. It is through ‘aesthetic education’ that the moral and cognitive faculties of man achieve their free expression, and so develop in accordance with their innate principles of harmony. The good state must therefore both encourage and embody that aesthetic understanding which brings the greatest intuition of unity between man and man and between man and nature.
Schiller was followed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), in the attempt to incorporate into the critical philosophy a comprehensive account of the nature and value of art. Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, arguing, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) for the same view of the world as self-creative ego, and the same view of knowledge, as a progression from subject to object, in which the subject plays the active and determining role. But like Schiller he was deeply influenced by the prevailing romantic attitude to art and to the creative imagination. He therefore sought to describe the aesthetic mode of understanding as an indispensable part of human consciousness. In the course of doing so, he invented the subject of art history as we know it and placed aesthetic experience at the pinnacle of human knowledge.
From the point of view of aesthetics Schiller is both more original than Schelling and of greater contemporary interest. And from the point of view of the history of philosophy Schelling is now entirely eclipsed by his colleague and rival Hegel, who nevertheless would not have thought as he did had Schelling, Fichte and Schiller not prepared the ground for him. All three of these last-named philosophers remain honourably situated in the history of ideas, being part of that great burgeoning of literary activity known as the Goethezeit. Had Hegel not existed, Fichte and Schelling would be studied as avidly now as they were by their contemporaries. But Hegel, the most powerful of the German idealists, towered above these lesser figures, presenting a philosophy which has been not only one of the most influential that the modern world has known, but also the greatest in range and imaginative grasp, the clearest in its understanding of the consequences that ensue when philosophy takes practical and not theoretical knowledge as its central interest, and the boldest in its contempt for any mode of thought that is not both a priori in method and infinite in ambition.
12 - HEGEL
G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831) was influenced by three separate intellectual movements: first, and most importantly, by post-Kantian idealism and by Kant himself. Secondly, by Christianity, and in particular by New Testament theology, to the subject of which much of Hegel’s early writing was devoted. (Hegel sought to give the complete exposition of the thought that ‘in the beginning was the Word’.) Finally, in his outlook and manner, by the literature of late German romanticism, for which he provided an elaborate philosophical justification. Hegel was a highly cultivated man of letters, and a friend of many of the artistic figures of his day, notably of the poet Hölderlin. Despite his bohemian entourage, however, he did not allow the fashion for romantic despair to overcome his will for success and establishment, and ended his life as the revered and comfortable official philosopher in the Prussian state which, by a happy but characteristic turn of thought, he had foretold as the highest expression of the political life of man.
Hegel’s lectures, published after his death, contain influential works on aesthetics and the philosophy of history; while the Encyclopedia
(1817, enlarged 1827) adumbrates an entire system in which science, logic, mind, art, morality and religion are given their respective situations, and in which the whole of the world, as it appears to reason, is blessed, as it were, by an act of philosophical recognition. There are three specific works which will concern us, all published in Hegel’s lifetime: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812-1816) and The Philosophy of Right (1821), which will be considered in chapter 14. The first two are notorious for their difficulty, in despite of which they have spawned interpretations and rival philosophies by the thousand. To many of Hegel’s contemporaries it did indeed seem true that the key to the mysteries of the universe had been found, and that Hegel’s implicit claim to utter the ultimate truth about everything should be upheld. Since his death the course of philosophy has been, to put it roughly, a process of steady disillusionment with Hegel, culminating in the vigorous rejection of his thought and method by analytical philosophers in the early years of the twentieth century. But even in our century his influence is felt. His philosophy of ‘being’ survives in amended form in the writings of Heidegger, and his theory of self-knowledge is present, in some version or other, in most of the major works of phenomenology, and in most theories of art. In this chapter I shall try to sketch certain central Hegelian themes in order to show why Hegel must still be seen as a towering presence in modern philosophy.
In one sense it was unfortunate that Hegel sought to found his philosophy in a general theory of logic, and particularly unfortunate that he should have advanced the theory of the ‘dialectic’ as containing the whole of metaphysics, thus illustrating, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise’. Hegel imagined himself to be replacing the empty formalism of the neo-Aristotelian logic with a new science, which has both form and content, and from which the nature of metaphysical truth can be derived. He therefore invented a new starting, point for logic, which was to deal, not with the formal structure of argument, but with the nature of Being itself. Logic deals with truth, not merely in the formal sense of telling us which arguments preserve truth, but in the substantive sense of telling us what truth is, and hence what is true (the ‘is’ here being an ‘is’ of identity).
A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition Page 19
