The Revolution Continued: Post-Kantians
- The 1780s: The Immediate post-Kantian reaction: Jacobi and Reinhold
- The 1790s: Fichte
- The 1790s after Fichte: the Romantic Appropriation of Kant (I): Holderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel
- 1795-1809: the Romantic Appropriation of Kant (II): Schelling
The 1780s: The Immediate post-Kantian reaction: Jacobi and Reinhold
The Critique of Reason turned against Kant: Jacobi
Jacobi thought that faith in reason to solve all of life’s problems was misplaced. Jacobi concluded that all our knowledge must rest on some kind of faith since any demonstration requires some principles from which it can be demonstrated, and that requires a stopping point, a set of principles that cannot be proved, and can only be accepted by faith.
Kant proposed that reason must by its own nature seek “the unconditioned”, although it can never satisfy itself in this regard. Jacobi said “as long as we can conceptually comprehend, we remain within a chain of conditioned conditions. Where this chain ceases, there we also cease to conceptually comprehend, and the complex that we call nature also ceases…the unconditioned must lie outside of nature and outside every natural connection with it…therefore this unconditioned must be called the supernatural.”
Reinhold, The “New University”, and the Defence of Kantianism
In Reinhold’s telling of the story, Kant had already answered Jacobi’s challenge by having demonstrated that reason and faith dealt with different aspects of reality. Kant showed that it was indeed impossible to use theoretical reason to attain a knowledge of God, but it had also demonstrated that there were necessary reasons for postulating on practical grounds both human freedom and he existence of a personal God. Thus one could acknowledge all the claims of modern, scientific reason while holding firmly to faith in God.
However, Reinhold believes Kant’s philosophy is not yet a science, but on its way of becoming science, so it does not have the authority that it needed yet, therefore, Reinhold tries to establish this authority that he thinks Kant’s philosophy lacks. Reinhold made it clear that he is not concerned with what Kant actually said, but what he should have said if he want to conclude such and such.
To address the “regress” problem from Jacobi, Reinhold tried to find the one first fundamental principle, he called he “principle of consciousness”: “In consciousness the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and object and relates it to both.” Both of the two stems of conscious knowledge: “intuition” and “concept” are representations, and the notion of what it meant for a subjective element of conscious to represent something in the world was for it to embody within itself a claim about something independent of the representations, this representational feature of conscious was its most fundamental element. And this principle requires only “mere reflection on the meaning of the words, which itself determines for the fact that it expresses”.
However, Reinhold did not notice that he had subtly moved Kantian philosophy in a direction that could only tendentiously be labeled Kantian. Kant’s use of “deduction” of categories is different from the logical use of the word, but is a legal use instead. It is intended to demonstrate the normativity of the categories and their bindingness on us as we make judgments about the world.
The 1790s: Fichte
Reinhold tried to start with some “fact”. Fichte argued that we cannot start with any “fact” at all because the kind of philosophical “science” Reinhold is striving to achieve is normative rather than “factual” in character. We should think in terms of basic acts of synthesis according to normative rules instead. Fichte rejected the notion of things-in-themselves in his “The Foundations of the Whole Doctrine of Science”.
For Fichte, the key problem to be solved in completing the Kantian system is the “Kantian paradox”. The problem of self-authorization. The basic dichotomy at the root of Kantian system, in the world as we experience it, we encounter ourselves as subjects (unities of experience, points of view), making judgments about objects (as substances interacting causally with each other in space and time), which, if true, answer to those objects that make them true. Everything we encounter is either a subject or an object, but this distinction is itself subjectively established.
Fichte believes that the only possible account of justification had to see the as capable of grasping certain necessary, a priori features of reality through an act of what he called “intellectual intuition”, for example geometrical rules.
The difference between Fichte and the previous philosophers is that all previous philosophers tried to find some basic object as a justification of our knowledge, for example, Plato’s forms, mathematical object, God in his eternal nature etc. However, the Kantian revolution had shown that no such object can be found, instead, nothing other than our own spontaneity and autonomy can serve as a basis for justifying our normative commitments. We simply had to grasp through an act of “intellectual intuition” that our thought could be subject only to those norms of which it could regard itself the author. In many ways, Fichte’s philosophy revolved around testing out the ways to best express that norm while avoiding its most paradoxical aspects.
Fichte first formulated the norm as “I = I”, which is more basic than the law of identity “A = A”. A = A is an inference (if A then A), and inference licenses could only be instituted by something that would be, not itself a “fact”, but an “act”, and since natural things cannot be said to act, the subject that institutes the license must itself be such an “act”, an act that institutes the license and also simultaneously authorizes itself to institute such licenses. This would be the apperceptive self, expressed in the necessary proposition, “I = I”, this necessity can “neither be proved nor determined”. The self, is not a natural thing, but a normative status, and it can obtain this status only by an act of attributing it to itself. Outside of its own activities of licensing, attributing statuses, and undertaking commitments, the thinking self is quite literally nothing. There can be no deeper ground of self than this self-positing. One cannot give any other non-normative explanation of the subject’s basic normative act of attributing entitlement to itself and to other propositions.
What struct Fichte’s readers is that this subject came into existence as it acted; prior to the act of instituting norms, there simply is no “self”, no subject of entitlement. A further question is: are there any criteria for attributing such statuses outside of what the “I” itself “posits” or could the “I” posit anything? Fichte’s answer is that there can be no ultimate criteria for positing except that which is entailed by the necessity of such positing in the first place, by whatever is necessary to maintaining a normative conception of ourselves.
Everything that has been said to exist - the Greek Gods, natural objects, sensations - is to be regarded as a “posit” and what takes it to exist has to do with which set of inferences are necessary in order to make the most sense of those “checks” found in our consciousness.
Fichte’s self is the transcendental self that is not an item within experience but a normative status that made conscious and self-conscious experience possible in the first place.
In Foundation of Natural Law according to Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte argued that self-consciousness requires positing other self-conscious entities. The existence of a world independent of our conscious activities and is therefore one of the necessary “posits” that the thinking subject is required to make. Freedom is the ability to respond to his (ultimately self-authorized) normative commitments by acting in the ways required by those commitments. Crucially, Fichte claimed that this can come about only if it is another free agent that performs this solicitation. The relation between cognition and practice therefore is “circular”. The circle consists of the following: we cannot attribute a commitment to somebody except on the basis on some performance, but we cannot understand something as a performance except by attributing prior commitments to the agent. The relation to other rational, embodied agents would therefore itself have to be construed not as a causal relation but as itself a normative relation. Fichte said that one’s very status as a free agent cannot be a matter of individual self-authorization, but rather a social authorization. “I can ask of a determinate rational creature that the recognize me as a free agent only to the extent that I treat him as such a free agent.”
The original idea of building up a new world based on “reason alone” as a replacement of the pre-modern “dogmatic” world seemed to be foundering on the worry that “reason alone” was not enough, that the promise of modernity, expressed in spontaneity and autonomy was really up to the tasks it had set itself.
The 1790s after Fichte: the Romantic Appropriation of Kant (I): Holderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel
The Problem of Self-Consciousness: Holderlin
Holderlin noted that the sense of self involved in our acquaintance with ourselves should not be confused with an identity statement. Prior to our reflective awareness of ourselves and even prior to our awareness of objects of experience, there is an “intellectual intuition” of “being”. The human agent apprehends himself as existing as an individual, and this criterionless self-ascription is not just of his own individual existence but of “being” in general. This can’t be given any kind of propositional articulation, since all such articulation presupposes an act of judgment. One’s existence cannot be explained causally like the perception of a tree, since it is a condition for self-consciousness, which is a condition for all consciousness of objects.
Holderlin and early Romantics took self-consciousness to be the “disclosure” of that which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible”, it’s similar to Kant’s notion of aesthetic experience. This led them to conceive nature as not quite the mechanical, Newtonian system that Kant had taken it to be, but as an even more teleologically structured “organic” whole and led them to reconsider what art or poetry might accomplish.
Holderlin’s critique of Fichte is that subjectivity and objectivity emerge together, it would be only different form of dogmatism to assert that one constructs an account of one out of the other. In Fichte’s philosophy, “subjectivity” came first, and he was stuck in the impossible task of how “objectivity” arose out of it.
Holderlin used his poetry to work out a complex conception of the way in which we imaginatively and creatively respond to the conflicting tendencies in our self-conscious lives that arise out of this elemental nature of self-consciousness.
Schleiermacher: Romantic Religion and The Irreducibility of Individuality
Schleiermacher’s book On Religion: Speeches to it Cultured Depisers proved to be epochal for the development of Romantic thought and provided expressions of its win themes of the irreducibility of individuality and the necessity of holding together in one thought the idea of our own creativity in the use of language and our responsiveness to a reality independent of us, all mixed together with an emphasis on the “aesthetic” dimension of human experience as disclosing something existentially and philosophically profound to us.
Schleiermacher was brought up in the pietist community which emphasis feeling and commitment to reform the world instead of dry orthodoxy or overly intellectualized theology. Schleiermacher went through a crisis of faith as he read Kant and he rejected all the pietist claims and arguments in favor of reason.
Schleiermacher said religion was based neither on morals nor on metaphysics but “breathes there where freedom itself has once more become nature.” Religion for Schleiermacher is the way the individual fundamentally sees the world. One cannot thereby be argued either into or out of such a view, since the nature of that fundamental view is ultimately a practical, even existential matter of the kind of person one is and must be, not of the kinds of arguments one can muster for certain conclusions.
One’s basic intuition for “one and all” must be highly individual since it is the manner by which one gasps the sense of one’s own existence as having its possibility only in terms of the larger sense of “being” that forms the horizon against which it is disclosed. To impose any philosophical system on people must be misguided and can only falsify the inherent ambiguity and uniqueness of the religious experience itself.
One’s basic “intuition” of one’s place in the greater scheme of things is as much conveyed by one’s emotional orientation as it is by any thoughts one might have of it. Every intuition is connected with feeling, and the basis for religion must be a subjective one that this is how I must stand with regard to the greater scheme of things. There must also be a plurality of such intuitions and therefore plurality of religions. There simply are no inferential links between any one such basic intuition and another. Because of the sheer contingency of such intuitions, the only appropriate exhibition of the real essence of religion must therefore be fragmentary and any systematic theoretical presentation can only distort what is really at stake in religious experience.
1795-1809: the Romantic Appropriation of Kant (II): Schelling
Schelling, Spinoza and Fichtean Thought
Fichte thinks that both subject and object are viewpoints for the neither subjective nor objective “absolute”. Following Fichte, Schelling thought that the unity of the subject and the object had nonetheless to be an “absolute I”, which he interpreted in Spinozistic terms as the underlying “absolute” reality common to both the ordinary sense of the “I” and he natural world (the “Not-I”). This “absolute I” straddles the boundary between subjective experience and objective world, and in intuiting the “I” in intellectual intuition, we are intuiting the basis by which the natural world thereby manifests itself to us in our experience and gives us reason for belief. Only in this way does idealism escape skepticism, the picture of a sharp divide between subjective experience and objective matters-of-fact. There is no way of ultimately arguing for the basic ways we interpreted the world, since all forms of argument presupposed a basic “take” on the ultimate structure of things which could not be demonstrated within that form of argument itself. Instead we resolved the basic problem by “intuit” them. Moreover, the “intellectual intuition” cannot be a part of conceptual knowledge.
For Fichte, the “Not-I” was simply a posit that the “I” required for its own self-consciousness. Such a view would never do justice to the independent reality of the world. For Schelling, the “intellectual intuition” of the rational and necessary structure of the world required philosophical reflection to go off on two “tracks” which unite only in an “intuition”. The insight brings together two viewpoints, each of which is necessary for our grasp of our lives as free, autonomous beings in a natural world. One viewpoint determines us as a part of nature, the other understands us as a self-determining being, they are manifestations of one underlying reality, the “absolute”. Schelling appealed to Leibniz’s notion of a “pre-established harmony” between mind and nature to make his point.
Naturphilosophie
For Schelling, nature can’t be purely a mechanical system because we are necessarily to construe ourselves as free, natural beings, we have to hold nature, regarded as a whole, as a series of basic “forces” or “impulses” that mirror at the basic level the same kind of determinations that are operative in us at the level of self-conscious freedom.
Nature needs to be understood in organic instead of purely mechanical terms, Kant’s own notion of reflective, teleological judgments pointed to that solution. We must think of organisms as having their purposiveness within themselves, as being an “organization”, where “each member of such a whole should indeed be not merely a means, but also an end.” Nature tends toward a growing kind of unity and inwardness that culminates in human communities, Schelling uses he term Geist, mind or spirit in its communal sense - coming to self-consciousness, an intellectual intuition of itself. Self-organizing nature and self-organizing human communities are two sides of the same coin. Naturphilosophie transforms our general picture of nature so that the philosophical and even existential problems having to do with freedom in a causal world simply cease to be problems. When we come to see nature in this way, we ourselves become different and no longer feel the unbridgeable alienation from nature that we come to feel.
Nature was pure self-organizing process, the nature found in natural science was only the determinate crystallizations of itself that this pure self-organizing process imposed on itself in its continual act of becoming. As pure process, nature is simply “identity”; as individuated into mechanical, chemical, organic, and mental organizations, it is “difference”; and the “absolute indifference point” is the universe, or God himself.
Transcendental Idealism
Schelling thinks that the proper procedure in philosophy does not consist in the refutation of philosophical problems but in their dissolution. The basic task of transcendental idealism is to show how we can keep a grip on the two apparently conflicting demands of acknowledging our full spontaneity while at the same time acknowledging something that does not itself seem to be a product of spontaneity.
Spontaneity (as ideal, and normative) and receptivity (as real, as our being affected by things-in-themselves) are thus two opposites that are “posited in one and the same subject”. The boundary between the subjective and the objective is not metaphysically fixed but normatively determined. We must perform a “synthesis”, which requires us to take up our experience both as being of an objective “universe at large” and as the way we “view the universe precisely from this determinate point.” We understand ourselves as particular points of view on an objective world that can be only partially manifested to us in our experience of it. Seen in this way, idealism is just a “higher” realism.
Schelling’s description of autonomy is different from Fichte or Kant since he describes it in terms of a developmental model of agency; we become autonomous by moving ourselves out of the realm of “nature” into a position where we are autonomous co-legislators of the social world in a way that is not constrained by the “givens” of the experience of the natural world but only by the social “influence” of others. The representation of the reality or solidity of the objective world rests on its being the “common world” of co-legistlative agents. For Schelling, the factual world of nature manifests itself only to agents as they belong to the moral world.
History, “Absolute Identity” and Art
Schelling used “absolute identity” which is neither subjective nor objective to resolve the conflicts in Kant’s third antinomy. This “absolute identity” can only be characterized as “the universal identity in which nothing can be distinguished”. Also Schelling insisted this “absolute identity” cannot be intellectual but must be aesthetic. The work of art discloses “absolute identity” in a non-discursive way that is nonetheless authentically true to the ultimate nature of reality.
Kant had argued that aesthetic judgments intimate that which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible”. Schelling took that further: the “absolute” which is the unity and basis of the distinction between subjectivity and objective points of view is also that which is the unity of both nature and freedom while being neither of them. It comes into view in aesthetic form precisely because it is neither subjective nor objective.
It is the aesthetic intuition of the whole of reality, the “identity” of mind and nature, that orients and constrains what would otherwise be the unconstrained “absolute will.” What philosophy cannot say, art can nonetheless show.