German Idealism

2019-10-07 0 views

Overall Structure of Modern Thought

Keep in mind the overall structure of modern thought, we have a tradition of continental rationalism represented by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz which after Kant leads into the German Idealism tradition, the point of the connection is the emphasis on the self. In the rationalism the emphasis is on the a-priori knowledge, that is to say, the inner intellectual resources of the self, the inner rationality of the self. And then the self is getting even greater importance in the development of German Idealism. We have as well the British Empiricist tradition represented by Locke, Berkeley and Hume which leads into 19th century Positivism and Empiricism which we’ll meet in people like John Stuart Mill and the 20th century with Bertrand Russel. We’ll follow the European trend all the way into 20th century John Paul Sartre and beyond. And then we’ll follow the empiricist trend, from Bentham and Mill way up again into 1950 and since.

Keep in mind as well the overall diagram. World view traditions like theism, naturalism and pantheism or something of that sort, each of them shaped by scientific models. First represented by Greek science, which lays emphasis on the objective reality of form, teleological world view. The second with mechanistic science, simply a fixed mechanical order of matter and cause effect mechanisms. Then around 18th, you begin to get the rise of historical science and biological science, both of which concerns with developmental process, so the third kind of the scientific model that has come to characterize 19th and most of the 20th century is a more organic sort, rather than mechanistic, organic in the sense of the intertwined relationships, everything connected to everything else in some organic fashion and with the notion of developmental process running right through it.

Introduction

The German Idealist are rejecting and reacting against the ultimacy of mechanistic science, that is to say they don’t believe the Newtonian mechanistic science tells us the nature of reality, they have a phenomenalist view as far as the mechanistic interpretation of the nature is concerned, it’s talking about appearances rather than reality, the underlying reality is more of an organic than a mechanical sort, it’s more of a developmental process than of a static order. One thing you can keep in mind, the 19th century idealism is going to be a metaphysics of change, a metaphysics of process, and it’s the root out of which later there grows 20th century process philosophy and process theology.

There have been three kinds of reactions to mechanistic science. One is that there must be exceptions to the mechanistic law, Descartes took that point of view, the mind is an exception to the causal mechanism that rules everything else, because the mind has free will, Scottish realist and John Locke seem to take that point of view as well. Secondly, there is a complete rejection of the mechanistic science as not telling us the nature of reality, Leibniz is there. His Monadology is more of a teleological scheme, in that sense Leibniz is an anticipation of what is coming next in 19th century, because we get, in this idealist movement, a renewal of the teleological picture of nature and history, it is end oriented, there is potency that is being actualized in the process. Then you get the phenomenalist reaction of people like Berkeley and Kant, saying that mechanistic science tells us about appearance but not reality.

Now comes the idealist, what it is doing is riding piggyback on the early phenomenalist view of science and particularly on the influence of Kant. Keep that in mind, it’s the reaction of the mechanistic science.

Second it is also a reaction against to the dogmatic rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th century. The kind of foundationalist approach that Descartes initiated with his first principles and then deductive reasoning all the way to get the whole system worked out. That sort of methodology if you think this is a strict mathematically ordered universe, a mathematical method fitting a mathematical universe, but if what you have is an organic kind of process, then you need a different kind of method. Here we notice it’s Kant’s transcendental method that is the key.

Third, these German Idealists are Kant’s Copernican revolution and that immediately rides on the notion of the transcendental method that focus on the constructive contribution of the self, that is to say, the key to understanding reality is the role of the subjective and creative self. You might think of it as the viewer looking through lens of his own self consciousness at the screen of reality as a whole, from this stand point, you see things through what the self consciousness of the human spirit provide. If we can, use the transcendental method, uncover, beneath all the particulars of human experience, the underlying essence of what the self is, then we can, in that light, see the reality of the whole projected on the screen. Projecting the image of the self on the reality as a whole, creating the universe in the image of the self, creating the whole of reality in one’s image. If that is the case, it’s going to follow, the structures of human consciousness are also the structure of the reality, or in Kantian language, the categories of understanding are the categories of reality. If there is indeed some sort of pre-formation, whereby forming of the self is in the image of reality, then by understanding the structures of self we can understand the structure of the reality. That’s precisely what these people are trying to do. So the transcendental method is an attempt to provide a description of the process of self understanding and self consciousness, so the development of self consciousness is a microcosm of the development of the consciousness of the absolute spirit, the all inclusive ground of being. You begin to see this idealism is going to be a monistic idealism, there is one all inclusive ground of being, on which the self consciousness is simply a microcosm.

We’ve observed, during the modern period from Descartes on, the ongoing question of the nature of the self. While Locke isn’t so sure, Hume only finds a bundle of perceptions with nothing to unify it, Kant finds that there is a synthetic unity of our perception, whereby there is some unification in the field of consciousness, and the schematization of the understanding brings the unification of the whole of one’s experience and thinking, but it is not an underlying substantive entity that is the unified self, it’s the structuring of the consciousness that is the unifier. That’s point of departure for the German Idealist. They are not looking for soul substance in the Cartesian sense, or immortal souls in the Platonic sense that have some eternal pre-existence, what it tries to do is to understand the self as structures self consciousness, that’s the notion of the self. What is it that unifies diversity of experience, what is the unifying action of the self, how are you going to characterize of self consciousness. If the self consciousness is the key to reality, then the question is what is the essential characteristic of self consciousness, of which everything else is just a by-product, then you get four different answers. In Fichte, moral consciousness, which takes from the Critique of Practical Reason. In Schelling, it’s what Kant calls the teleological, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic consciousness. Schelling is the major philosopher of German Romanticism. For Schleiermacher, it’s the religous consciousness, and Schleiermacher is the great 19th century theologian, building his theology as a projection of religious experience, if you like, romanticism in theology. What Hegel does is simply to say that it’s simply the conceptual capacity that we have, the ongoing process of trying to grasp the concept of being itself. So in trying to more of more fully the concept of myself, I’m grasping more and more fully the concept of being itself. You have to distinguish the finite self and the absolute self, absolute in the sense of the one all inclusive ground of being.

New Scientific & Philosophical Model

What we are going to find is first a new scientific model, if you’d like evolutionary. Developmental biology in both micro and macro level, in micro level the beginning of genetics, the macro level the evolutionary biology. A new philosophical method that begins with the transcendental method, and is referred to as the phenomenological method. The dominant European philosophy in the 20th century is phenomenology. Phenomenology is not phenomenolism, phenomenolism is a position, a theory, it’s saying all we know is apperance. Phenomenology is a method, it’s the study of the phenomena, it’s not saying phenomena is all we can know. If you are trying to get the structure of the self, what is the functional structuring that goes on in the development of the self consciousness, you have to describe the phenomena of developing consciousness. It’s a descriptive method, it’s an attempt to prove something with demonstrative arguments. The old demonstrative arguments from Descartes, Locke are part of the dogmatic tradition. The validity of the description when you get the inter personal agreement about what indeed is properly being described.

Before the beginnings of philosophy, back in Greek poets, there is an idea of ordered unity such that the ordering of the moral life of an individual is a microcosm of the ordered justice of a city state which is a microcosm of the unity of the universe. So the just individual is a microcosm of the ordered universe. In a way it’s coming back to that theme. The ordered unity of the self is a microcosm of the ordered unity of reality as a whole. But for the Greek philosophers, it was developed in terms of the ordered unity of the physical universe, now it’s the ordered universe of the world of ideas. So don’t be surprised in reading Hegel, you run into the notion of the logos, because Hegel in his religious writings reintroduce the concept of logos which is been eclipsed in the mechanistic age which had no teleology.

New Logic

We have a new logic as well. What we have had is the logic of syllogism, what we are going to get is a logic of process, and that is dialectic. Syllogistic logic is a logic of unchanging universals. The basic rule of syllogism is that there is a middle term and the middle term is being universally extended at least once. That is to say, in “All A is B, All B is C, therefore all A is C”, B must be universal at least once in order that the first B can be part of the second B. In other words, you need to have unchanging universals. But now if we got developmental concept in science and history, how are you going to think about what’s going on in the developmental process. Obviously that is going to raise the question about whether there is any universals and Hegel is going to restructure the whole theory of universals. He have to work with logic of process rather than the logic of permanence. If you think of Pre-Socratics where the antithesis between Heraclitus and Parmenides is the antithesis between universal change and universal permanence. Now we’re moving to the notion that change is more ultimate than permanence. In dialectic, the process of thought is like a mental meandering finding your way through a maze of ideas.

New Epistemology

Therefore also a new epistemology, what we have back in 17th and 18th century is representational theory of knowledge. But for German Idealist, the ideas are no longer representations. Ideas arise in dynamic interaction with the larger world, so what you have an epistemology that stresses direct awareness, within this there is a gradual clarifying of concepts.

New Metaphysic

A new metaphysic: idealism rather than materialism or dualism. Everything is of nature of mind, spirit, self. It is developmental monism, an evolutionary idealism. Everything is moving towards a full actualization of that spiritual life and vitality which underlies everything else. It’s sometimes spoken of as Immanentistic in that any divine being, absolute ground of being is immanent in the entirety that has profound theological consequences. It means there is no transcendental God who has to reveal himself to a creature who are external to himself so that there is no such thing as special revelation. Because if divine is immanent then the divine consciousness wields up in your consciousness so there is no such thing as acts of revelation, there is no such thing as ex-nihalo creation, there is no such thing as a historic act of redemption, it’s all process from within, imminent. There is no unique incarnation, how can there be if there isn’t a transcendent God to incarnate himself. The incarnation is simply a symbol for talking of the imminence of the divine in everything. So watch for this when we get Hegel’s philosophy of religion. The metaphysic is sometimes described as gradualism, that is to say everything in existence is to some degree, mind, spirit, consciousness. The old notion of degrees of being all up the hierarchy is now translated into a developmental process, this is part of the evolutionary optimism. And for Hegel the fullest manifestation of the spirit comes out of German culture. This was the age of nationalism because it’s the embodiment, the full self-discovery, self realization of the identity of the spirit of a people. Nationalism is a product of romanticism, a product of German Idealism.

Comments Philosophers in German Idealism

The conception of what unifies self, what is the unifying function, which is the dominant unifying function, the all absorbing function of the self.

Fichte

Fichte is raising the question of what is the ground that underlies all of our experience, what is it the pre-condition that makes human type experience possible, that makes our consciousness the way it is. He rejects dogmatic metaphysics, and opts for a transcendental method, as did Kant. The thing he find as he describes the experience of the self is that the nature of the self comes through prominently as that of a moral being, where the will is the most dominant and most revealing faculty, now interestingly his phenomenalogical description that leads to that is more of a description of the epistemological side. He poses the old question from Descartes, how do I know that material bodies exist. And his initial response is a description that results from people like Berkeley and Hume. I don’t know that physical bodies exist, but in my moral struggle my inner moral struggle between acting out of my duty and following inclination in the world around me, I found that my moral life postulates the existence of a non-self, that is posed to the moral life of a self, so it’s in the moral life where we find the opposite of the moral way, which is posited by the will. There is no proof that a physical non-self world exists, but whatever it is in that non-self, it stands in a dialectical opposition of the self as we know it in the moral life. Then what am I going to say about the nature of reality? Obviously in the reality as a whole there is no antithesis to the self and what is projected is ego, the absolute will. That is to say reality as a whole has what we would call the cognitive characteristics in varying degrees. In human there is conscious will, in animal life, instinctual drive, in vegetative life, the constant trust of things to grow. The way in which he pictures it is following: The ultimate reality is the absolute ego, manifested in finite ego and finite non-ego, what we observe in the phenomenal realm is that antithesis, ego vs. non-ego. We know the reality of thriving of the will, we don’t the reality of the physical non-ego, that’s just posited and so projecting this to the scree, absolute ego is the nature of reality.

Schelling

Schelling’s point of departure is on the Critique of Judgment rather than the Critique of Practical Reason. The focus is on the feeling one has on the oneness of nature, the feeling of the ongoing teleology of which our aesthetic experience is a part. Schelling writes about the philosophy of nature in terms of an evolutionary idealism, the physical world is in an early stage, in its gradual revolution of living conscious spirit, a nature is a living force, impulsive, creative with novelty and when he turns to philosophy of mind, he sees same sort of thing in human culture, there is a low level of creativity and emerging drive for novelty in theoretical thought, sense perception. There is more of this creative drive, in the practical realm, in the moral and political, as Fichte said. But it’s fullest manifestation is in the aesthetic realm, where the contemplative of the first level, perception, is combined with the active dimension of the second, the moral level, action and contemplation combined in creative art, creative vitality, imaginative, creating new worlds of experience. He traces, phenomenalogically, this kind of thing and concludes that reality itself is overall creative drive, emphasis on feeling in the unfolding of the absolute in the course of history.

Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher finds religious consciousness the key. He objects to Kant’s reducing religion to little more than ethics, because religious experience is far more than simply the moral will, it is of absolute dependent on the divine. But for absolute dependence to be the case, God is not another individual being along with us being, God is not transcendent, God is being itself, the ground of all being. But he doesn’t want that to imply Spinoza’s pantheism. Spinoza has an atomistic view of individual as discrete, isolated from each other, Schleiermacher goes for a more relational view, I’m not externally related to other things with just a channel of continuity going through me, this is rather an organic relationship, the self is then defined what I am, what is being unified in this religious experience is that whole network of relationships. So God is all-embracing ground of being and what he tried to do is therefore to articulate a theology to define Christian theological concepts in these terms. The language of theology therefore becomes symbolic, rather than being taken as the literal sense. These are phenomenological descriptions of the functional unity of self-consciousness with the conclusion that what we discover in the self is simply a microcosm of the whole which is then projected as the nature of reality.

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