After Hegel

German Philosophy, 1840–1900

Frederick C. Beiser

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400852536
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Moderne Philosophie

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

1

THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY

1. SOURCES OF THE CRISIS

Beginning in the 1840s, the decade after Hegel’s death, philosophers began to suffer a severe “identity crisis.”¹ They could no longer define their discipline in the traditional terms widely accepted in the first decades of the nineteenth century. So they began to ask themselves some very hard questions. What is philosophy? What is its purpose? And how does it differ from the empirical sciences?

Before the 1840s, philosophers felt no need to raise such basic questions. The speculative idealist tradition seemed to have provided clear and convincing answers to them. That tradition, from Reinhold to Hegel, had a very definite conception of the aims and methods of philosophy, and of its relations to the empirical sciences. According to that conception, the aim of philosophy is to provide a foundation for all the sciences, a basis to secure them against skepticism. Although there were within that tradition different views about the specific method to create that foundation—reasoning from self-evident principles, intellectual intuition, a priori construction, dialectic—it was generally agreed that the method would have to be a priori and deductive. Whatever the method, the philosopher would use it to construct a complete system of the sciences, an encyclopedia, which would assign each science its special place in the general body of knowledge. Philosophy was thus “the guardian of the sciences,” their founder and systematizer. Such was the conception of philosophy first proposed by Reinhold in his Elementarphilosophie, followed by Fichte in his Wissenschaftslehre, applied by Schelling in his System der gesammten Philosophie, and then realized by Hegel in his vast three-volume Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften.

By the 1840s, however, this conception of philosophy had become completely discredited. Most intellectuals no longer believed it possible for philosophy to provide a foundation for the sciences through a priori means or rational excogitation alone. There was no confidence in self-evident first principles, intellectual intuitions, a priori construction, or even a dialectic. The foundationalist program had come under heavy criticism from several quarters: from the “physicalists” (Justus Liebig, Emil du Bois Reymond, Hermann Helmholtz); from the early neo-Kantians (Fries, Herbart, Beneke); and from the later idealists (Lotze, Trendelenburg, and Hartmann). All seemed to concur on one central point: that general principles and a priori reasoning cannot by themselves provide concrete results. We cannot derive substantive conclusions from formal principles, determinate results from indeterminate premises. All content, all knowledge of existence, has to derive from experience alone. The foundationalist program of speculative idealism was condemned as a relapse into the bad old ways of pre-Kantian rationalism.

This critique of the foundationalist program raised a serious question about the future of philosophy. Philosophy, it seemed, had no reliable method of its own. There appeared to be only two options: “the synthetic method” of the speculative tradition, which begins with universals and descends to particulars; or “the analytic method” of the empirical sciences, which begins with particulars and ascends to universals. The synthetic method had now been discredited; but the analytic method was more characteristic of the empirical sciences. So what should or could be the method of philosophy?

The identity crisis of philosophy arose not only from the collapse of the foundationalist program but also from another source: the dramatic rise of the empirical sciences in the first half of the century. The sciences now seemed to cover the entire globus intellectualis, so that there seemed no special subject for philosophy. The growth of an experimental physiology and psychology in the first half of the century seemed to make life and the mind now part of the domain of empirical science. Not only had the sciences taken over every aspect of the universe; they also seemed perfectly autonomous, capable of achieving valid results on their own without the apron strings of philosophy. So even if philosophy could provide a foundation for the sciences, they did not really need or want such a foundation anyway; their methods of observation and experiment were sufficient on their own to provide reliable knowledge. While philosophy had once been the mother of the sciences, her children had now come of age and wanted to leave their nest. This new attitude of the sciences toward philosophy was captured by the neo-Kantian Jürgen Bona Meyer: “The daughters now demand independence from their common mother, and they do not suffer it gladly when they are supervised or corrected; they would prefer that their old and morose mother lay herself to rest in her grave.”²

Together, the critique of the foundationalist program and the rise of the empirical sciences made the identity crisis complete and inescapable. That critique meant that philosophy had no characteristic method of its own; and the rise of the empirical sciences meant that it had no distinctive subject matter of its own. Whether in form (method) or in content (subject matter), philosophy did not deserve to exist. Proper method (observation and experiment), and every possible subject matter, seemed the privilege and preserve of the empirical sciences. Philosophy now began to seem obsolete, an antiquated discipline in danger of being replaced by the empirical sciences. Little wonder, then, that the neo-Kantian Kuno Fischer, writing in the early 1860s, referred to the “Lebensfrage der Philosophie,” by which he meant the question of its life or death.³

Fischer had good reason to be troubled. For, already in the 1840s, the materialists and positivists were celebrating the death of philosophy. They had identified philosophy with the defunct foundationalist program or with the metaphysics of speculative idealism; and now that these had proven bankrupt, philosophy itself seemed to be a thing of the past. All legitimate intellectual questions, the positivists and materialists believed, could be solved by the empirical sciences, so that there simply was no place anymore for philosophy. Ludwig Feuerbach expressed this new attitude toward philosophy in a pregnant but paradoxical proposition: “True philosophy is the negation of philosophy; it is really no philosophy at all.”⁴

It is important to recognize that there was an institutional context behind the identity crisis of philosophy. The crisis was not only a spiritual or intellectual problem but a “bread and butter” issue. Most philosophers could survive only within a university, only as members of an academic faculty; very few could live on book royalties and lecture fees alone. For their salaries, though, they were dependent on government funding, since universities were public institutions in Germany. To receive funding, a faculty had to demonstrate that its discipline was legitimate, that it had its own “scientific” methods, and that it occupied a necessary place in the academic division of labor. But if philosophers were unsure of themselves, unaware of their own methods and subject matter, how could they make their case for government funding? The issue was pressing, because government funds were limited and because there was great competition among faculties for them. In the final decades of the century, the competition between philosophy and psychology became especially intense. Psychology seemed to be making philosophy redundant, because it could treat the mind—an old preserve of philosophy—according to the methods of observation and experiment. Many philosophers resented the assimilation of their discipline to psychology, given that a psychology appointment sometimes took precedence over a philosophical one.

Given the urgency and stakes behind the identity crisis, and given the vacuum left after the collapse of speculative idealism, it should not be surprising that there were many attempts to define philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Philosophy was defined in the most various ways: the logic of the sciences, critique, metaphysics, epistemology, the general system of the sciences, the science of normativity, and worldview. All of these definitions had their strengths and weaknesses; none was entirely successful in dominating the intellectual stage. Let us now have a look at these definitions, keeping constantly in mind their merits and problems, and how they intended to resolve the identity crisis.

2. TRENDELENBURG’S PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS

One of the first philosophers to respond to the identity crisis, and to offer a new and original conception of philosophy, was Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72), professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1833 to 1870. Trendelenburg addressed the crisis as early as 1833 in his inaugural lecture as professor extraordinarius,⁵ but his most sustained and substantial effort appears in his Logische Untersuchungen, which was first published in 1840.⁶ No one worried more about the status and survival of philosophy in the new scientific age than Trendelenburg. Feuerbach’s proclamation that the future of philosophy will be no philosophy provoked and challenged him.⁷ As a classical scholar, Trendelenburg was a firm believer in the philosophia perennis, the thesis that there has been throughout the ages, and despite all the changes of history, a single valid philosophy. Trendelenburg identified this philosophy with what he found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle; he called it “the organic worldview,” the doctrine that the entire universe forms a single living organism. It was Trendelenburg’s conviction that this worldview is far from obsolete; rather, its chief principles are, have been, and forever will be eternally valid, as true today as they were thousands of years ago. Trendelenburg knew all too well, however, that if he were to keep alive the classical legacy, he had to respond to the growing identity crisis of philosophy. Somehow, he had to show that the “organic worldview” of Plato and Aristotle is still relevant to the modern scientific age. This was one of the central tasks of his Logische Untersuchungen.

Trendelenburg begins his Logische Untersuchungen by taking issue with the conception of philosophy in the speculative idealist tradition.⁸ Accepting the autonomy of the new empirical sciences as his starting point, Trendelenburg argued that there is no need for the foundationalist program of speculative idealism. Philosophy cannot provide a foundation for the empirical sciences, he argued, because thinking on its own is empty and acquires its content only from experience. Rather than attempting to provide a basis for the sciences, philosophy should recognize “the fact of science,”, i.e., the fact that the sciences are autonomous, that they have proven their own success, and that there is no point in worrying about skepticism regarding them.⁹ However, abandoning these foundationalist aspirations does not mean, Trendelenburg insisted, that there is no task or place for philosophy at all. On the contrary, philosophy should now become “a theory of science” (Wissenschaftstheorie), a discipline whose special business is to investigate “the logic of the sciences.” There is still a need for philosophy, he stressed, because the particular sciences are more interested in applying their methods than investigating them. Because they do not reflect on their most basic concepts and presuppositions, such reflection should be the special task of the philosopher. The philosopher should then become, Trendelenburg recommended, a second-order scientist, a logician whose special concern is “the methods of the special sciences.”

Trendelenburg’s reorientation of philosophy around the logic of the sciences was very strategic. In a single stroke it not only abolished the foundationalist program but also guaranteed philosophy a necessary place in the academic division of labor. As the logician of the sciences, the philosopher performed an invaluable task that scientists themselves could not perform. Trendelenburg’s strategy would prove influential, the precedent for some of his talented students, among them Franz Brentano, Hermann Cohen, and Eugen Dühring.

Although some aspects of Trendelenburg’s conception of philosophy were new and modern, others were older and more traditional. Trendelenburg was far from reducing philosophy down to epistemology, as the neo-Kantians later did. The influence of the classical tradition upon him was such that he continued to stress the abiding importance of metaphysics, i.e., a knowledge of the universe as a whole.¹⁰ It was the task of philosophy to provide such knowledge, he insisted, by attempting to construct a general system of the sciences. In a striking Platonic formulation, Trendelenburg states that philosophy is “the science of the idea” (Wissenschaft der Idee), where “the idea” determines the whole in its parts, the universal in the particular. The highest idea, the foremost goal of philosophy, is the universe as a whole. Yet Trendelenburg was careful to place regulative constraints upon such metaphysics. He insisted that the idea is only an ideal, a goal we should strive to approach even if we cannot attain it. He also stressed that this idea should not be the starting point but the result of system-building. Metaphysics had to follow an analytic method, proceeding from the parts to the whole rather than from the whole to the parts; and r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Identity Crisis of Philosophy
• 2 The Materialism Controversy
• 3 The Ignorabimus Controversy
• 4 Trials and Tribulations of Clio
• 5 The Pessimism Controversy
• Appendix: Two Forgotten Women Philosophers
• Further Reading
• Index