From Romanticism to Critical Theory

The Philosophy of German Literary Theory

Andrew Bowie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134797615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

From Romanticism to Critical Theory explores the philosophical origins of literary theory via the tradition of German philosophy that began with the Romantic reaction to Kant. It traces the continuation of the Romantic tradition of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, in Heidegger's approaches to art and thruth, and in the Critical Theory of Benjamin and Adorno.
Andrew Bowie argues, against many current assumptions, that the key aspect of literary theory is not the demonstration of how meaning can be deconstructed, but rather the relevation of how questions of language and literature change modern philosophical conceptions of thruth. He shows how the dialogue between literary theory, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy can profit from a re-examination of the understanding of language, thruth and literature in modern German philosophy.
From Romanticism to Critical Theory will provide a vital new introduction to central theoretical questions for students of philosophy, literature, German studies, cultural and social theory.

1 Philosophical origins

Kant, Jacobi, and the crisis of reason

DOI: 10.4324/9780203026250-2

New frameworks

It is increasingly apparent that we lack an appropriate archaeology of contemporary ‘literary theory’. This chapter will begin to establish aspects of such an archaeology by investigating philosophical arguments whose relevance to and influence on subsequent theory will only become fully evident in later chapters. I trust the reader will bear with me in this trip through the ‘icy wastes of abstraction’: exploration of these philosophical arguments will help us both to understand what differentiates literary theory from other approaches to literature, and to see how the issues associated with literary theory play an ever more important role in contemporary philosophy. The figures of Immanuel Kant and his contemporary F.H.Jacobi (1743–1819) appear in virtually any book on the Goethezeit, as participants in the debates which lead to Romanticism, but they are hardly ever seen as being inextricably connected to ideas that have recurred in the work of Derrida and in other areas of contemporary philosophy. This recurrence can suggest how intellectual traditions which diverged in the course of the nineteenth and throughout much of this century have now begun again to converge, for reasons which will become apparent in the course of this book.

The initial importance of making clear what differentiates literary theory from other approaches to literature is apparent in the fact that the practice of ‘literary theory’ in the widest sense has been around at least as long as Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle’s descriptive and prescriptive move beyond consideration of particular epic, dramatic and lyrical works, to a theorisation of the general constituents of a successful work of what is now termed ‘literature’ created the framework for nearly all subsequent attempts at such theorisation, and, indeed, for much literary criticism. Had recent literary theory remained within this framework it would never have generated the degree of controversy which it has. The roots of this controversy lie in the late eighteenth century, when vital philosophical assumptions that had obtained throughout the history of what Martin Heidegger and his successors term ‘Western metaphysics’ began to come under fire.

The need to move beyond many of the questions in Western thought posed by the dominant strands of Greek philosophy and carried on in Christian theology’s adoption of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions is, as we shall see later, one of the most influential themes in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger, who, along with Saussure and Nietzsche, is perhaps the most significant influence on contemporary literary theory, came to attribute a vital role to literature in his later attempts to redefine the task of philosophy in the modern world. He did so because he thought that literature offered access to truth of a kind which the dominant forms of truth in the modern world had obscured. Without understanding the history of which Heidegger is only one part we will fall into the trap of much recent literary theory, which relies on an untenable account of modern philosophy that is too dependent upon Heidegger’s own selective account.

It has been noticeable in recent years that many strands of philosophy have moved away from the totalising claims associated with the rise of a notion of Western rationalism which has been too readily associated by Lyotard and others with the philosophy of modernity as a whole.¹ Oddly, at a time when it would appear that the application of modern scientific methods is unifying human knowledge across the globe, a universalistic notion of ‘Reason’ based on the model of natural science is now actually regarded with suspicion in many quarters. In the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty and others the idea that there is an overarching conception of reason which can accommodate the sheer diversity of different world-views and evaluations in the contemporary world has come under severe attack, not least in Rorty’s contention that philosophy needs to see itself as a kind of literature if it is to escape its failed Platonic obsession with Truth. Truth with a big ‘T’ is, for Rorty, what would bind together all the ways in which we think things to be true in a grand philosophical theory which showed how thinking and being correspond to each other. The initial sources of this kind of attack on universalising notions of reason lie in the period now to be examined. Furthermore, there are many other issues in recent debates that have their counterpart in the philosophical movements which begin in the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter will look at one particular and very influential theoretical constellation—there are many other related sources of the issues—which most clearly exemplifies the shift that eventually leads, via Heidegger and others, to the questions of contemporary literary theory. What I term ‘literary theory’ should therefore be understood here in the widest sense, and it includes approaches, like Lyotard’s, which contend that we have reached a ‘post-modern’ era beyond the universalist rationalism of ‘modernity’ (see the Introduction to Bowie (1990) for another account of the basic debate). The reasons for my wide application of the term relate, as we shall see, to the Romantic critique of Enlightenment universalism and its links to literary theory, as well as to the broad use of the term in much contemporary American debate. Because I do not wish to divorce literary theory from mainstream philosophy, such a broad usage should not be regarded as misguided: the problems of literary theory are the problems of modern philosophy and do not constitute some wholly new area of study.

The theme which preoccupied many major thinkers in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany was the increasingly questionable status of human reason. In the light of the more and more evident difficulties for theology posed by new approaches in philosophy and the emerging modern natural sciences, new legitimations had to be sought for the idea of reason.² It is, as we shall see, at the moment when reflections upon the status of reason become linked to increasingly secularised conceptions of language that certain key preconditions of literary theory are fulfilled. To understand why, we need first to understand some of the questions concerning the legitimation of reason more thoroughly than has been the case in most recent accounts, such as Lyotard’s, of the perceived failures of Western rationality. Both Kant and Jacobi questioned the legitimation of reason in ways which have echoes in all subsequent attempts to understand reason in modernity, and which form important links to literary theory. Their differing responses to the question of reason thereby offer two useful models which can orient our understanding of the history of literary theory. By concentrating on a very few particular theoretical aspects of their work the main themes which will concern us from now on should become easier to grasp.

The overall intellectual context at issue here is, of course, the critique of the Enlightenment and the rise of German Idealism and Romanticism. If we insist on such labels, though, it is too easy to slip into another familiar version of the history of ideas or into a reductive Marxist contextualisation of the issues,³ both of which can tend to remove the issues from their connection to the state of theory for us now. The aim here is to see the historical issues, not as exhibits in an intellectual museum, but as the very material of our contemporary self-understanding. These ideas are clearly related to the historical and social upheavals of their own time, but they cannot be reduced to or fully explained by their historical and social contexts. If that were possible their new significance for contemporary theory would become hard to understand. By showing how the issues to be presented here have, in differing forms, underlain most of the major theoretical debates in literary theory we will be better placed to judge the real contributions of that theory.⁴ The extremity of the reaction against the work of Jacques Derrida in both Britain and America was, for example, not least a result of the failure to see just how much his work directly and indirectly owes to issues we are about to consider. Why, then, is Kant so central to these issues?

Kant and the critique of the ‘ready-made world'

It is too often forgotten that the perception of Kant by many of his contemporaries was of a dangerous iconoclast. Indeed, Jacobi linked consequences which he saw in Kant’s philosophy to the wider danger of what he termed ‘nihilism’.⁵ As we shall see, Jacobi regarded nihilism as the inevitable result of the failure of philosophy to explain the fact that the world exists or is manifest at all. Kant, who himself avowedly believed in God, was regarded as a threat in his own time because he rejected the idea that philosophy can have access to the (theologically) inbuilt structure of reality. However this aspect of Kant’s thought is understood, it evidently puts into question the idea that the ultimate truth of the world is accessible and therefore constitutes the knowable goal of philosophy or natural science. The idea of such accessibility must rely upon some form of the presupposition that the fact of the matter is already out there to be discovered in the world. This presupposition will turn out to be very difficult to defend, as I have already suggested in the Introduction when considering ‘representational’ conceptions of truth. Rather than being a mirroring of what Hilary Putnam has termed a ‘ready-made world’ (Putnam 1983) whose structure can be said to pre-exist our knowing it, for Kant knowledge of the world became the product of the activity of the knower.

Kant’s revolutionary thought was, as is well known, primarily occasioned by David Hume’s assertion that the notion of causality gave us no warrant for claiming that the world was inherently bound by fixed causal laws. All the causal laws we know are, for Hume, the result of repeated observation, which gives us no right to predict that the connections of empirical data we happen to observe on one occasion will, because the world is really like that independently of our seeing it, always recur in the future. By arguing in this way Hume took a step which, so to speak, began to remove the theological glue from the structure of the knowable universe, rendering that structure a contingent product of observation. In trying to overcome the sceptical consequences of Hume’s position, while acknowledging the undeniable force of Hume’s initial objections to a metaphysical interpretation of causality, Kant was led to explain successful scientific theories like Newton’s theory of gravity in a different manner from all previous philosophy.

Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’ is founded on the claim that all previous philosophy had assumed that ‘our cognition has to follow objects’ (KrVp. B XVI), which led to the problem of how we could arrive at any firm foundations for knowledge if our access to objects involved the sort of empirical contingencies which Hume had revealed. ‘Metaphysics’, the attempt to arrive at ‘a priori’ knowledge, which was not subject to the vagaries of each individual’s shifting empirical perceptions, seems impossible if it is to ‘follow objects’, given that Hume had restricted our access to objects to their contingent effects on our sensory apparatus. Instead, Kant suggests, we should assume that ‘objects follow our cognition’: this would still entail a priori foundations, but ones which are located in the way we necessarily apprehend the world, rather than in the world itself. The aim of philosophy was still to explain ‘objective truth’, of the kind that the new natural sciences were now so successful in providing, but objectivity takes on a wholly different sense. An object for Kant is that concerning which a subject can make a true judgement, not something which is true independently of its appearing to the subject. The world of judgements becomes a world of ‘syntheses’, in which the subject brings together ideas (Vorstellungen) which are in one sense different, but in fact are judged to be the same. By relying solely upon the certainties which can be generated by the conditions of our own necessary cognitive activity, such as the ability to constitute identities between differing experiences, Kant thinks that he can get round Hume’s objections to a priori knowledge, which therefore becomes dependent upon the subject, not upon the object.

The further result of Kant’s position, though, which will trouble Jacobi and nearly everyone else who engages with it, is that the world ‘in itself’ becomes inaccessible to human cognition. Once this move is made the constitution of the truth about the world is necessarily bound up with our capacity for judgement, rather than being assumed to exist independently of this capacity. The ramifications of such a conception are emphatically still with us in modern philosophy, not least because the beginnings of the critique of the idea of truth as representation are present in it.⁶ Manfred Frank suggests of Kant’s account of the constitution of the object-world by the understanding: ‘If objects only come about at all via synthetic acts of the understanding [in judgements], the understanding cannot be made into the imitator of objects’ (Frank 1989b p. 175). As such, truth cannot pre-exist the cognitive activity of the subject. The link to questions of art of Kant’s conception lies in the way cognitive activities associated with the aesthetic, such as the invention of new metaphors, can play a role in the establishing of truth in the cognitive domain, as well as playing a role in the way we constitute the meaningfulness of the ‘life-world’.

If the world were known to be ready-made, as opposed to being constantly articulated via the cognitive activity of the subject, then we would already have our destiny inscribed within us in such a way that science would ultimately be able to tell us what we are and why we are. It was this deterministic view of existence that had informed what became, via Jacobi’s influence in the so-called ‘Pantheism controversy’, which began in 1783, the most important metaphysical system for late eighteenth-century Germany: Spinoza’s Ethics. Both Kant and Jacobi see much the same danger in Spinoza, the danger of a world which operates in a deterministic manner and thereby renders human freedom and moral responsibility merely illusory, but they draw significantly different conclusions about how to respond to that danger. The structures which trouble them are, as I shall now show, the foundation of the traditions in modern philosophy which lead to literary theory and to many of our contemporary philosophical concerns.

Kant’s ultimate aim is to establish the goal of human existence once the idea of a theological order can no longer be presupposed: the law-giver in both the cognitive and the moral realm now becomes ourselves, rather than anyone or anything else. Famously, Kant was therefore led, via his wish to square the determinism of natural phenomena with our sense of moral duty, to split the human world into the law-bound realm of appearances and the free world of the inner ‘intelligible’ self, which he locates in the realm of the ‘in itself’. Clearly the two realms must be in some way related, because we ourselves are both physico-chemical machines and autonomous beings. The question was how such a relationship could now be established without invoking access to a ready-made world in the manner which Kant had shown to be invalid.

This much is probably familiar to many readers, who may well by now be asking how it all connects to literary theory.⁷ The fact is that it will be problems in epistemological foundationalism, even in the more modest version proposed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, which lead to the story of aesthetics and the beginnings of literary theory which I wish to tell here. As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, the significance of ‘lite...