So school's out for summer, and I have on my mind several blog posts that I've been wanting to do. I'll probably burn myself out today and blog again around the time school starts up in the fall. But in the meantime, I'd like to recap some of what I've learned this semester, both to solidify the knowledge in my own mind as well as to hopefully interest other people in the areas I've been studying. First: Early German Idealism.
I'm mainly going to jot down the history between Kant and up to, but not including, Hegel. So, Kant wants to say that we have two sources of representations. On the one hand, we have receptivity: the senses. On the other hand, we have spontaneity: concepts. Kant's system in the Critique of Pure Reason is then a way of showing how there must be necessary (and so therefore objective) connections constituting and combing the appearances, so that we can have mathematical and scientific knowledge; why must we think of the world in terms of cause and effect, or as divided up into quantities, for example.
Kant also has his practical program, in Critique of Practical Reason. Part of his first Critique was that, in order to cognize something, you must both be able to think about it and be given the object in experience. Things like God, freedom, and the soul can never be given in experience, however, so they can never properly be part of our theoretical knowledge. Instead, they are postulated by our practical reason, which tells us how to act. It may be the case that we are not free, but if reason alone can determine the will (the condition under which we can have morality), we would have to be free, and so since we have this sense of morality we must presuppose freedom in order to act according to it. God and the soul are similar cases.
Next enters Reinhold. He was first training to be a Catholic priest, then part of the radical Englightenment, became a Mason and part of the Illuminati, and became a Protestant pastor. Philosophically at this time, he started as a critic of Kant, then one of Kant's boldest supporters, started his own project, became a Fichtean, left Fichte for a "rational realism", and finally worked through his own liguistic philosophy (source: SEP). I can understand someone like this. I will talk about his support of Kant for the moment.
Reinhold thought that Kant's philosophy was the perfect solution to the problems of skepticism and religious enthusiasm of the day (between Aberglaubt and Ueberglaubt). Kant agrees with the enthusiasts that one cannot give a purely rational argument for God's existence, while at the same time agreeing with the skeptics on the importance of reason. To this end, Kant had the notion of a "rational faith" in his practical philosophy, which unites both head and heart. This is how Reinhold popularized Kant, going so far as to liken Kant's program with that of Christ in bringing together religion and reason.
However, Reinhold started believing that something was missing in Kant's system. Kant had kept his system full of all these dualisms, such as that between theory and practice and between (passive) appearances and (active) concepts. But the only way to know whether it is consistent is to make it properly scientific and ground it on a single principle. Reinhold took from Kant that we have things which are represented (i.e. the object), while we represent (as the subject). There must be some faculty of representation which underlies the two, even though we can never experience it. Representation, or Vorstellung, is most likely an infelicitous term; "intention" might be better, and our professor wanted to make the case that Reinhold was even a proto-phenomenologist.
Reinhold together with Kant were attacked in a work entitled Aenesidemus, at the time anonymous but revealed to be by G. E. Schulze, later the teacher of Schopenhauer. This review charged the Kantian philosophy with illegitimately assuming things about both the object and subject of cognition, defeating its own transcendental standpoint. Whatever the merits of Schulze's work itself, it prompted Fichte to respond.
Fichte thought that Reinhold was right in giving a single starting point to Kant's philosophy, but that problems arise by making it a separate fact, or Tatsache, which would involve one in making Schulzian errors. Instead, this "faculty" of representation must be an action, or Tathandlung: the Absolute Ego posits itself as an activity. In so doing, a non-ego against the ego is posited, and this is the start of the subject-object or representing-represented dichotomy.
Various other options come up after this; the usual history goes from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, where Hegel went through the Subjective Idealism of Fichte to the Objective Idealism of Schelling to get to his own Absolute Idealism. The picture is not quite so simple. Schelling did give a higher priority to nature than did Fichte. Fichte had to explain why one must start with the subject instead of with the object. Fichte then proceeded to claim that one could start with the object instead and proceed to dogmatic metaphysics, but that one could never explain freedom. One would have to choose what philosophy one works in based on one's own character: the person who is overly concerned with things would start with the object, and the person who actually cares about freedom and hence morality would start with the subject.
Schelling gives a more positive account of the object. One can start with the object and proceed to natural philosophy, or one could start with the subject and proceed to transcendental idealism. Eventually, Schelling would say that there must be an identity between the subject and the object, and starting with either could not get you to this identity. The Absolute in a way must remain unknown; this became his critique of Hegel (I don't really know Hegel; I think Schelling's critique is more or less that Hegel can explain what happens when you start thinking just fine, but that Hegel cannot explain the existence of thinking in the first place). In addition, the unknowable Absolute behind thought became influential (so I hear) for people like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
Finally, the last figure we studied: Hoederlin. Hoederlin was friends with Schelling and Hegel, and most likely highly influential on their systems. Unfortunately, Hoederlin did not publish any of his philosophical work, and not even all of his poetry. He went crazy at a relatively young age as well, which didn't help matters, though it did give Hegel an excuse to drink an extra bottle of wine on his friend's birthday in memoriam.
Hoederlin wanted a poetology which would blur the distinction between philosophy and poetry, and for this reason some of his philosophical thought is found in his poems. I'm still not quite sure what he was saying; On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit is easily the most difficult piece I've ever read, and that's in a semester where I read most of the Critique of Pure Reason. One point he makes, I think, is that language is not a product of us, but we are a product of language; write anything and you are the spokesperson for language. The "I" in a piece of poetry is not you or any other person, but reflects this poetological underpinning to the subject and the object. Also, poetry can balance dichotomies and so bring them to their original state which philosophy in its analytic mode must take apart.
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