History of Philosophy

Volume II

Johann Eduard Erdmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317853367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. This is Volume II of three volumes on modern philosophy from 1890 looking at the history of philosophy from the first period of Pantheism, Descartes, Malebrance and Spinoza to the third period of Mediation and the works of Kant, Fichte, Reinhold, Schelling and Hegel to name a few.

THIRD
PERIOD OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: MEDIATION.

K. Fortlage: Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant. Leipzig, 1852. Friedrich Harms: Die Philosophie seit Kant. Berlin. 1876.

§ 296.

INTRODUCTION.

1. SINCE the period that is usually designated as that of the most modern philosophy occupies the same position in the history of modern philosophy that would be assigned to the latter in the whole history of philosophy, its problem cannot, as can that of the periods already considered, be brought within a single formula. There are required several, which, obviously, must agree in this respect, that they all demand the mediation of opposites. In the first place, the preceding development of the philosophy of the eighteenth century has raised the problem of getting beyond the mixture of idealistic and realistic theories to what in contradistinction thereto was above (vid. § 293, 8) termed ideal-realism or real-idealism. This superior position, which is at the same time negative and sympathetic, philosophy, as opposed to the two one-sided tendencies, can take only as it attempts to comprehend, in the two-fold sense of the term, those tendencies. This it does when it makes them its object: only by so doing does it rise above them. Precisely in a similar manner had also the philosophy of the Christian era taken its beginning; namely, by so transcending the Grecian and the Jewish worlds as to assign to each its proper place (vid. § 122, 1). Locke’s realistic theory of knowledge was easily united with the idealistic theory of Leibnitz by a kind of addition, if one brought the two under the common generic notion of selfobservation, and then told how the mind receives impressions and forms conceptions. In both, popular philosophy and empirical psychology played a very important part. It is an entirely different problem that Kant places before himself when he seeks after the presuppositions and conditions of perception and the formation of conceptions. His transcendental investigations are specifically different from the psychological, or anthropological, investigations of his contemporaries. The former show upon what cognition is grounded, the latter in what it consists; the former explain, the latter exhibit and describe; the relation between the former and the latter is really, as Fichte later formulated it, the same as that between biology and life. Kant lifts philosophy above the opposition of empiricism and rationalism, not by making it a mixture of the two, but by conceiving it as the knowledge of rationalism and empiricism. It is clear that with this entirely new problem which was set before philosophy, a very essential step was taken towards the solution of the problem which was settled as the goal of philosophy in general (vid. §§ 2 and 3), viz., that it is the mind’s knowledge of itself, a thing as essential to the perfection of philosophy as to that of anthroposophy, which (vid. § 259) modern philosophy was held to be.

2. If the problem just now stated to be the first problem of the most modern philosophy is solved, we have, in this solution, just because realism had not yet in the first period of modern philosophy entered into conflict with idealism, a return to that problem; and the most modern philosophy must consequently attempt a fusion of the philosophy of the eighteenth century with that of the seventeenth. By the solution of this second problem the most modern philosophy becomes what, indeed, every philosophy should be, a conscious formulation of what, as unconscious impulse, rules the age. Upon the process of disorganization which (vid. § 274) was stated to be the distinctive characteristic of the second period of the modern era, there followed the impulse towards reorganization; this, or, as it has been otherwise called, the Restoration, is the goal to which everything tends in the period in which we still are. As regards the life of the State, this process of reorganization was introduced by the political commotions in America and, especially, in France. Whoever looks upon the French Revolution as a process of disorganization forgets that the disorganization had already begun before it, and that it was not a mere phrase when with the egoistic cry for liberté and égalité was united the self-forgetting cry for salut public. Rousseau taught that the former, Richelieu, that the latter, should be placed above all else. That, thanks to a Washington, the process of integration in North America ran a normal course, does not forbid our seeing in the French Revolution also a process, not so much of decomposition as of healing, the end of which, although the process has, alas! been again and again interrupted, is in no respect different from what all the revolutionary commotions of the last hundred years have to show,—the bringing of the immutable rights of individuals (whether persons, corporations, or States) into harmony with the sovereign right of the whole (whether it be a State or a union of States). An entirely similar tendency characterises the religious life of this period. In opposition to ecclesiasticism, which had come almost to regard piety as not indispensable, and to anti-ecclesiastic insistence upon personal piety or conviction, there appears now a healthier, now a more or less diseased, longing for religious union without ecclesiastical inflexibility. Among the phenomena that arose out of this desire, there must be added to this latest event, the earlier desertion to Catholicism and the formation of religious circles, viz., the union of the Evangelical Confessions, whose purpose is to gain greater dogmatic definiteness than the Reformed Confessions, greater subjective mobility, and greater lay-participation than the Lutherans, and for whose inner justification the fact speaks, that from its establishment dates a more vigorous ecclesiastical and religious life. As far, finally, as concerns the relation of Church and State, and the constitution of the former, the changing preponderance which in all European States, at one time the territorial, at another the independent, element, acquired, shows how the age endeavours to possess without one-sidedness, and hence, simultaneously, what the two preceding periods had sought one-sidedly. The philosophy of this period acquires the same mediatory character when (as was said above) without sacrificing the acquisition of the eighteenth century, namely, individualism, it returned to the totalism or universalism of the seventeenth century, and then, by raising itself above pantheism and atheism, struggles towards monotheism, which stands midway between the two, just as certainly as one stands between zero and infinity (O…1…∞ expresses in a schema the relation of the three tendencies). The philosophy of the period of reorganization will seek therefore to rise above the system of rigid necessity, to which the denial of all teleology led, and likewise above the one-sided teleology which, carried to its consequences, leads to a deification of contingency and caprice, and to strive for a concrete doctrine of freedom, according to which the State is neither the all-devouring Leviathan, nor an unavoidable evil, which is to make itself useless, and is until then ignored by the cultured man,—a doctrine of freedom, too, with which politics and morals, compulsory law and the sanctity of the individual conscience, are possible.

3. As from the solution of the first problem there results a second, just so there presents itself with this latter a third. It has been shown (vid. § 264) how far in the organizing period of modern times the spirit of antiquity has lived again in a rejuvenated form. In a precisely similar way the spirit of the disorganizing period shows decided analogies with that of the Middle Ages. It is easy to make this assertion appear paradoxical, perhaps even ridiculous, since it connects knights and monks with hoop-petticoats and pigtails (which, however, every one does more than I, who talks of a “mediæval pigtail”). But this comparison should not deny the differences, the contradictions, in fact, between an age that allowed the State to crumble through guild and corporation interests, and an age that declared war upon guilds and corporations. It asserts only that the latter means going further in what the former began. Their opposition to all uniformity, this sign of the most recent times, places, notwithstanding their divergence, the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century upon a level, much as the knight going forth upon an adventure and the adventurer of the eighteenth century stand upon one. (Both would at the present day be incarcerated by the police officer.) Only because of inner relationship does the Enlightenment hate the Middle Ages. What the individualistic spirit, which gives to that age so poetical a colouring, and the Church, that institution of grace, which opposes nature and hence annuls national boundary lines, had brought to pass in the Middle Ages, is equally affected here by the not less individualistic emphasizing of private judgment, and by an abstract cosmopolitanism. There, as here, an interest in nature and in the State, resting more or less upon a national basis, was impossible. The utilitarian view of nature which obtained in the eighteenth century is just as teleological and unphysical as the mystical view of the Middle Ages; and the ultra-catholic jurists come to the same theory of the State as did Rousseau. As the modern age is heir to antiquity and to the Middle Ages, so this relation is repeated in the modern age in such a way that its first period (one may style it modern antiquity, or the antiquity of the modern age) and its second (the modern Middle Ages) are testator to the third (the modern modern-age, or the modern age of the modern age). Philosophy, naturally, exhibits a counterpart to this. In this third period, more completely than it succeeded in doing in the other periods, has it to solve the problem which was designated (vid. § 259) as the problem of modern philosophy. This it will do if it rises above naturalism and the deification of the State, and so likewise above the theosophical hatred of nature and contempt of the State, to a standpoint on which physical and political philosophy, moral philosophy and theology are integral constituent parts of a system. That this elevation to a higher standpoint will here take place in a manner similar to that of the first problem, and that the same holds true also of the second, that is, by making an object of what the mind had previously accomplished, lies in the nature of the case.

4. If the three problems should be completely solved by one and the same system, it would be the alpha and omega of this period, and completely fill it. The fact that he who was above designated as the beginner of this period and as the greatest German philosopher, only began it, makes him the epoch-making philosopher. The further development of philosophy after him consists in the fact that the solutions begun by him were carried further towards completion. This development may the better be compared to what the Socratic schools (vid. §§ 67–72) did for the philosophy of Socrates, since, as they scientifically reproduced always one side of the master, so here it is the separate masterpieces of Kant which were successively the starting-point of a profounder investigation. But the post-Kantian philosophers display an advantageous divergence from the followers of Socrates, in that those who came later did not overturn what the master had laid down, but accepted it, and only extended and carried it out more rigorously; so that their relation resembles not so much that between the Cyrenaics and Cynics, as, rather, that between these two schools and Plato, or that between Plato and Aristotle. Naturally the further development begins where the solution demanded was most nearly attained by the epochmaking system; that is, as will be shown, in the case of the first problem, with the solution of the question put by the eighteenth century: How are Leibnitz and Locke, Berkeley and Hume, to be reconciled? After this had been answered more satisfactorily than Kant had answered it, by Reinhold and his Critical opponents,—since, as Fichte admirably said (of Reinhold alone), they gave to what Kant had taught in the Critique of the Theoretical Reason a solid foundation,—there appears in the foreground the second question—which had been put by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—but upon a Kantian basis, i.e. after Kant had already pointed the way to its solution. Fichte and Schelling agree throughout in holding that philosophy must be ideal-realism, and therefore adopt what Reinhold and his opponents had taught, though supplementing it,—the first by seeking a still deeper foundation upon which to base what Kant had taught in his Critique of Practical Reason; the second by seeking a foundation for what Kant had taught in his Critique of Judgment. At the same time, however, the antithesis, developed and established by them, of the Science of Knowledge and the System of Identity, makes clear how, upon the basis laid by Kant, the conflict between the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and Spinozism may be renewed, only to lead to a more lasting peace. The philosopher, finally, who sought to mediate between Fichte and Schelling, namely, Hegel, who at the same time sought to adjust the opposition, which had contemporaneously made its appearance upon a critical basis, between pagan naturalism and mediæval theosophy, is also he through whom and whose school Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, which had been almost forgotten, received due recognition. From the foregoing statements it is apparent into what divisions the following account will fall. The original form which Kant gave to his system, as well as what his disciples made of it in the mere desire to extend it and secure it against assault, is here treated under the title Criticism. Those forms of Criticism which in reality transcend it, because they give his doctrines a profounder basis, and were in consequence discountenanced by him (vid. § 6), will receive their corresponding titles.

FIRST DIVISION.

Criticism.

A.—KANT.

§ 297.

LIFE AND WRITINGS.

Borowsky: Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Kant’s. Königsb., 1804. Jachmann: Immanuel Kant geschildert in Briefen an einen Freund. 1804. Wasiansky: Immanuel Kant in seinen lelzten Lebensjahren. KÖnigsb., 1804. Schubert: Immanuel Kant’s Biographie, in the 11th vol. of Kant’s Sämmtl. Werken. Leipz., Voss, 1842. Reicke: Kantiana. Königsb., 1860.

1. IMMANUEL KANT was born at Königsberg, on the 22nd of April, 1724, of an artisan family that had come from Scotland, and had formerly written its name Cant. He attended school and the university in his native town, and studied at the latter, besides mathematics and philosophy, theology, and conducted reviews in these subjects with students. Although, inasmuch as enrolment with one of the higher faculties was required, he had himself registered as a student of divinity, it was never his intention to devote himself entirely to theology. After he had, in the year 1747, by the work: Thoughts upon the True Estimation of Living Forces, declared to the world that one defends the honour of reason when one defends it in the various personages of acute-minded men; that, where there are opposing views, the truth must always be presumed to lie in an intermediate position, etc., and that he had sought to settle in accordance with this principle the dispute between the Cartesians and the Leibnitzians by drawing a distinction between dead and living forces, he left his native town, because of discouraging prospects, and was for several years private tutor in various families. In the year 1755 he habilitated himself as doctor legens by defending the prescribed dissertations; and remained such until the year 1770, there being as yet no extraordinary professors. As his first work had attempted to reconcile Descartes and Leibnitz, so had his Latin habilitation-thesis, on the Principle of Metaphysical Knowledge, attempted to reconcile Wolff and Crusius; so, finally, had his anonymously published work: General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), attempted to reconcile Newton and Leibnitz, or the mechanical and teleological points of view. If this work displayed, as did some slighter pieces having a physical content, an enthusiasm for mechanism in nature, which makes it clear why Kant was so attracted by Lucretius, so, on the other hand, the following-named works: On the False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762); Attempt to Introduce the Notion of Negative Quantity into Philosophy (1763); Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God (1763), and the prize essay, On Evidence, with which he competed with Mendelssohn (§ 294, 8), show with how great a number of questions he was, at one and the same time, occupied in which an interest had been first aroused by the Middle Ages. In short, it is clear that the subjective conditions for the solution of the third problem were given already in this period. For the rest, it appears from the report of the drift of his lectures in the winter-semester of 1765–66, that in this period he occupied essentially the standpoint of an “Enlightener” of the school of Wolff. Indeed, he was then also lecturing on the Compendia of Baumeister, Baumgarten, and Meier. But now modifications of his standpoint became visible, which are exhibited point by point in Kuno Fischer’s Immanuel Kant (the third and fourth volumes of the work mentioned above, § 259), a work which may here, once for all, be given as on the whole the best monograph on Kant. Anticipations of a newer and higher standpoint are to be found, as indeed the title indicates, in his: Dreams of a Spiritualist explained by the Dreams of Metaphysic (1766), and: On the first Ground of the Distinction of Objects in Space (1768). This new standpoint, however, appears quite clearly in the work with which he entered upon his office as ordinary professor, but which, having been written in Latin as an academic specimen, and printed in but few copies, received no attention.

2. The dissertation: De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis (1770) forms the limit between the two periods in Kant’s life which Rosenkranz properly distinguishes as the heuristic and the speculative-systematic. It shows us Kant as he was after Hume had “waked him out of his dogmatic slumber,” and when he had risen above the opposition the reconciliation of which we called the first problem of the most modern philosophy. At the same time ideas began to form in his mind the fusion of which was called the second problem. The positiveness with which Kant, after the beginning of the disturbance in North America, placed himself on the side of the Colonies as against the Mother Country, and later, when opposite tendencies prevailed in America, upon the side of those who desired to strengthen the power of the Union as against the individual States; further, his rejoicings at the earliest commotions in France; the severity, again, the horror even, with which he declared himself against the execution of the King,—these go hand in hand with the theory of the State that was then fermenting in his mind. In this theory he was later not so close a follower of Rousseau as at an earlier period, conceding room to the claims of the entirely opposite standpoint, that occupied by (the almost unknown to him) Spinoza and (the very well known to him) Hobbes. The fact that both elements are combined in him explains how such diverse judgments concerning the French Revolution could proceed from his school as those of Rehberg and Fichte. Eleven years the thoughts of the above-mentioned dissertation were maturing, and then, in the course of a few months, they were thrown upon paper, and appeared as the work which marks the birthday of the most modern philosophy, just as, a century and a half earlier, the Essais Philosophiques marked that of modern philosophy. This work was the Critique of Pure Reason (Riga, Hartknoch, 1781). Connected with this, as having been occasioned apropos of the Garve-Feder review of it, is the: Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysic (Riga, 1783), in the very first lines of which, as if he had divined how men would sin against it up to this very moment, Kant says that it was not written for tyros but for masters, and that even they might learn something entirely new from it. In rapid succession now followed, after so long a silence, the most significant works. There appeared the second edition of the Critique, not indeed always improved where changed, yet by no means so spoiled as it has been the fashion to assert. There appeared also: The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1786); Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1787); Critique of Practical Reason (1788); all in perfect agreement with the teaching of the Critique of Pure Reason. This cannot be said, without qualification, of the Critique o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION, §§ 258–263
• FIRST PERIOD. PANTHEISM
• SECOND PERIOD. INDIVIDUALISM
• THIRD PERIOD. MEDIATION
• CONCLUSION. § 330
• INDEX