Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries

by Daniel O. Dahlstrom

Overview

Immanuel Kant, the Prussian thinker at the forefront of the German Enlightenment, decisively shaped what is arguably the central philosophical legacy of his era, a legacy of critical rationality and ethico-political self-determination. In Philosophical Legacies, Daniel O. Dahlstrom brings exceptional scholarship to an examination of the diversity and lasting influence not only of Kant but also of some of his most prominent contemporary critics.

Dahlstrom makes a thorough study of various authors such as Johan Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Friedrich Schiller, and later Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He shows that the legacy of German Idealism remains undeniably relevant today. He examines diverse aspects of these philosophers' legacies—legacies which continue to find their way into contemporary philosophical debates.

Among the many topics Dahlstrom discusses are the relation of science to ethics and the different modes and conditions of knowledge. He also considers the nature and legitimate reach of aesthetics; the ends of history and art; the place of conscience in ethical life; the religious significance of philosophy and art, and the political potential of art; the roots of ethics in sexual life; the morality of equal opportunity; and the speculative idea of a philosophical responsibility that cannot be deferred.

The essays trace carefully the histories of the influences of earlier thinkers and their legacies upon later thinkers. But the essays engage these histories with a view to indicating, and in some cases critically weighing, the significance of these legacies—spawned by one of the mostfertile periods of German thought—for philosophical thinking in the present.

Daniel O. Dahlstrom is professor of philosophy at Boston University. He has authored, edited, or translated numerous publications including Husserl's Logical Investigations, Philosophy and Art, Nature and Scientific Method, Das logische Vorurteil, Heidegger's Concept of Truth, Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, and Schiller's Essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813215211
Publisher:	Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy Series , #50
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.43(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.04(d)

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Philosophical Legacies

Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries

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By Daniel O. Dahlstrom

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-1521-1

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Chapter One

THE UNITY OF KANT'S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Apart from the trivial senses of having been written by the same individual, in the same language, and with the same general style and structure, at the same place (Königsberg) and during roughly the same period (the Enlightenment), there is considerable controversy as to the extent to which some sort of underlying unity may be ascribed to the doctrines elaborated in Kant's three critiques. There are those who, like the great German idealists and materialists (I am thinking of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx, respectively) seem certain that they have found the key to such a unity, but at the cost of erecting and thereby transforming the insights of Kant's critical philosophy into a kind of absolute science. Others, for example, those of a more Aristotelian or of a more positivist stripe, are just as convinced that, in the wake of Kant's defense of mechanical explanations in natural science and his deconstruction of traditional metaphysics, Kant's talk of morality and aesthetics, teleology and religion, is simply inconsistent and purely apologetic. Still others, not unsympathetic to Kant's philosophical project, look outside his critical works to his essays on history and politics in order to uncover the underlying unity to his thought. Interpretations of this sort heed Kant's own view that it is possible to understand a thinker or writer better than the thinker or writer herself does. The aim of the following paper is, however, more modest, though no less daunting and controversial. The aim is to try to understand how Kant himself, at least at a certain point, namely, at the end of the critical decade of the 1780s, perceived the unity of his system. Before turning to this task, it may be useful to indicate some reasons why there might be something to be gained by such an undertaking. One central reason is the way in which Kant, in coming to this self-understanding, wrestles with the very tensions that define contemporary culture.

A great part of our lives is dominated by the juggernaut of science and technology. In contrast to centuries past, we look to the institution of science and not religion in matters concerning the truth about nature in general. Increasingly science uncovers how nature at microscopic and macroscopic levels, in our genetic make-up and in various ecosystems, decisively influences our lives and well-being. Not unconnected with this march of science, every day our lives seem to become a little more dependent upon a thick web of technologies: technologies of energy, production, medicine, communication, and defense.

At the same time, we have a keen sense of the limits of science and technology, namely, the dense reality and inscrutable fates of individuals. Science is, for the most part, concerned with individual phenomena only as confirming or disconfirming instances of theories always developed at some level of generality. When an individual who is supposed to be in a particular species or class exhibits anomalous or aberrant behavior, this is of interest to the scientist, but only as the promise of a new classification, the determination of a new type. Similarly, individuals have an undeniable place within technologies but only as interchangeable parts. Technologies are typically constructed for human beings in general or for communities or even for types of individuals (for example, the disabled), but not for individuals as such. There are, to be sure, important exceptions to this rule (notable in the application of some medical technologies such as prosthetic surgery). Nevertheless, social and economic constraints require that technologies aim principally for a common, not an individual, good.

Perhaps, then, it is not so strange that our culture at least to some extent sets limits to science and technology. However, setting these limits is due to more than just the fact that science and technology, however beneficial they are for individuals, inevitably construe individuals in terms of generalities. Our moral and legal traditions positively affirm the radical integrity and significance of the individual, ascribing it distinctive rights and responsibilities. Despite the overwhelming evidence of physiology and marketing research and even despite the increasing appeal to psychiatrists' testimony, courts still purport to judge people on the basis of the intentions and degree of freedom discernible in their decisions and actions. We hold ourselves, lovers, friends, and family accountable even if we are also able to forgive. But both holding accountable and forgiving ourselves and others make sense only if there is something that is supposed to be done and only if we are free to do what we are supposed to do.

We seem, in effect, to live in two incompatible worlds. There is the world of science that explains how things in nature in general come about and thus how generic things can be made to come about. The world of science holds great, indeed undoubtedly the best, promise of mastering nature or-if the idea of such promise is an overly and dangerously pretentious dream-at least of maximizing our place in nature. Yet it seems just as surely to be ultimately in mortal conflict with any notion of the sort of individual accountability and freedom presupposed by our moral heritage. The world of morality and religion, moreover, holds out to us a promise incontestably greater than that of science, namely, the promise of final justice and an immortal destiny.

If this scenario rings true at all for our contemporary culture, then Immanuel Kant is very much our contemporary. Kant, more than any other philosopher, suspends human existence between the claims of science and those of morality. The problem of the unity of his critical philosophy is nothing less than the problem of the unity of our culture, our contemporary existence. In order, however, to appreciate Kant's own solution to this problem, it is first necessary to see how he formulates the problem. This task, as already noted, is quite formidable since it requires an overview of, at the very least, his three critiques. Moreover, in addition to the substantive question of the unity of the contents of the three critiques, there is the historical fact that, if there is such a unity, it was a developing one. For, in the first place, there is no reason to think that Kant envisioned a system in the form of the three critiques when he penned the final lines to the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. The Critique of Practical Reason does not take shape until about the time he is revising the first critique, six years later. More significantly, in the first critique he denies the very possibility of a critique of taste, basing his denial on the fact that rules or criteria for evaluating the beautiful are merely empirical. It is accordingly somewhat surprising that, in a letter to Reinhold dated December 28, 1787, he writes that he is at work on a critique of taste and has discovered "another type of a priori principles." Moreover, within the following two years the critique of taste becomes only the first half of the eventual Critique of Judgment, as the principles of the latter are extended to teleological as well as aesthetic judgments.

Nevertheless, once the third critique was completed, Kant proceeded to give his readers some important clues regarding the unity of the critical system. Each of his critiques-together with the "fourth" critique, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone-can be viewed as providing an answer to one of the three questions that, in his view, every philosopher worthy of the name should address:

What can I know?

What should I do?

What may I hope for?

In what follows, as a means of stating the problem and addressing the unity of Kant's critical philosophy on its own terms, the arguments and conclusions of each of Kant's three critiques are summed up as an answer to one of these three questions respectively.

1. "What can I know?" In 1781, at the age of fifty-seven and after a decade of relative quiet for so prolific a philosophical writer, Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason. There, countering what he considered a skeptical challenge to the legitimacy of pure and applied mathematics as well as the legitimacy of a theoretical science of nature, Kant set out to demonstrate what makes these disciplines possible. Boldly proposing that space and time are forms of human sensibility and that the fundamental concepts of theoretical knowledge can be derived from the logical acts of human understanding, Kant explained how arithmetic, geometry, and chronometry are intuitively necessary, how scientists, carpenters, and engineers can successfully apply the ideal character of mathematics to the real world, and how everything studied by the natural sciences is linked together-at least at a certain level-in a chain of causal mechanisms.

Kant's explanation was novel because, unlike his more rationalist predecessors, he grounded the pretensions of mathematics and physics to universality and necessity, not in some grand metaphysical scheme of God and nature, but rather in an analysis of human subjectivity, specifically, the cognitive capacities of the human subject, construed as the conditions of any possible experience. This new sort of grounding (he called it "transcendental") distinguished him from the likes of Leibniz and Wolff in other ways as well. From the fact that human cognitive capacities-basically, the understanding and the imagination-are finite, he drew the inference that the validity of mathematics and theoretical natural science is inherently linked and thereby also limited to the phenomenal world, that is to say, to the world as it appears or insofar as it can be experienced. At the same time, this combined justification and limitation of science implied the illegitimacy of the speculative science known as "metaphysics," insofar as it claims to know or to be able to demonstrate the nature of things in themselves beyond the phenomenal order. From the theoretical point of view of legitimate sciences, the traditional themes of speculative metaphysics-an immaterial and potentially immortal soul, spatial or temporal beginnings or ends of the universe, freedom, and a first cause or supreme being-are, in Kant's technical jargon, simply ideas, empty concepts referring to what lies beyond any possible experience. These ideas are generated by a pretension of pure reason to make theoretical claims about objects solely on the basis of its otherwise quite legitimate capacity to make and determine valid inferences a priori. Hence, Kant names his masterpiece the Critique of Pure Reason to underscore its objective of demonstrating that such ideas as those of the soul, the beginning of time, and God, as products of pure reason, are neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

At the same time, Kant labors to show how these ideas are perfectly natural, inevitable, and useful, even "indispensable." They serve to remind science at each stage of its development that the greatest possible unity (homogeneity, specificity, and continuity) to its research always lies ahead of it. These ideas have no transcendental use, that is to say, they provide us with no knowledge of objects, but they have an immanent, heuristic use. They constitute the indispensable but usually tacit assumption of all empirical research, namely, that nature as it is actually experienced conforms to our attempts to understand it in a logically coherent manner. There is, moreover, another purpose that, in Kant's eyes, is served by his critique of the ideas of pure reason. By showing that the idea of God can be neither proven nor disproven, he claims to have freed religion from speculation and thereby removed any possibility of an atheistic objection to it.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, then, the truncated answer to the question "What can I know?" is that I can know the truth of claims made in the theoretical disciplines of pure and applied mathematics and physics, but I cannot know the truth of claims made by speculative metaphysics.

2. "What should I do?" With the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, Kant's critical activity was only beginning. That immortality, freedom, and God, as ideas and thus neither provable nor disprovable, cannot themselves be matters of knowledge, leaves open the possibility that they are matters of faith. Yet, if it is not possible to determine the truth about these ideas on the basis of theoretical or speculative reason, why should we believe in them? Kant gives his answer to this question in his second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1788. Unlike the first critique, the Critique of Practical Reason is concerned with reason, not as a capacity to know (Erkenntnisvermögen), but as a capacity to determine the will (Begehrungsvermögen). The "will" here signifies something quite private and intimate, the interior of a person's desires, intentions, and choices, regardless of whether they are realized or not. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant argues not simply that reason has a capacity to determine the will but that the will is free only when it is determined to act by a rational principle. In other words, a person is self-determining or free to the extent that his or her choices are in fact determined by a principle issuing from his or her reason alone and not by anything given, that is to say, not by any combination of physiological and/or psychological conditioning.

The moral law, Kant argues, is just such a principle. In other words, by formulating the moral law, Kant is answering the question "What should I do?" but this answer is at the same time an acknowledgment of the possibility of freedom. To be sure, how a free will is possible remains for Kant "a problem that human reason cannot resolve"; freedom is, as he puts it, an "inscrutable" fact. Nevertheless, what I should do is act in such a way that what motivates me personally could at the same time serve as a law for everyone or, what for Kant amounts to the same, I should treat humanity, in myself and others, always as the purpose of my actions, always as an end and never merely as a means. The universality of the moral law in the first formulation of the categorical imperative and the reference to humanity in the second formulation testify to an ideal that is not given in experience. Instead, this ideal, a world in which we treat each other with mutual respect as persons and not things, a world in which our wills are not so much subject to nature as nature is subject to our wills, can only be an imperative of reason, a law it imposes on itself.

The moral law, so construed, does not tell us to be happy; a conception of happiness is always a product of experience, inevitably based upon some mix of physiological make-up, psychological factors, and social conditioning. Insofar as choices are motivated by such a conception, they are not free choices. Nor can a conception of happiness, properly speaking, serve as a basis for morality with a pretense to more than a merely relative or conditional validity. There is a notorious difference of opinion among individuals and cultures as to what happiness is. But, on Kant's analysis, instead of instructing us to be happy or maximize our happiness, the moral law demands categorically-with no "ifs, ands, or buts"-that we act in such a way as to be worthy of happiness, without promise of the same. The moral law is not about what is or will be, but about what ought to be. As Kant also puts it, virtue and happiness are two completely different things. In other words, questions of morality, of what I should do, are not questions of happiness nor is there anything in the moral law that insures our happiness if our actions are in fact determined by what the moral law dictates.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................ix
Abbreviations for Editions Cited....................xiii
Acknowledgments....................xv
1. The Unity of Kant's Critical Philosophy....................1
2. Knowing How and Kant's Theory of Schematism....................17
3. The Natural Right of Equal Opportunity in Kant's Civil Union....................33
4. Jacobi and Kant....................43
5. The Legacy of Aesthetic Holism: Hamann, Herder, and Schiller....................67
6. The Ethical and Political Legacy of Aesthetics: Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind....................93
7. Hegel's Science of Logic and Idea of Truth: Countering the Skeptical Legacy of Formalism in Philosophy....................103
8. Mutual Need and Frustration: Hegel on the Religious Legacy of Modern Philosophy....................120
9. The Sexual Basis of Ethical Life: Hegel's Reading of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit....................141
10. The Dialectic of Conscience and the Necessity of Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right....................152
11. Hegel's Appropriation of Kant's Account of Purposiveness in Nature: Evolution and the Teleological Legacy in Biology....................163
12. Marxist Ideology and Feuerbach's Critique of Hegel....................179
13. Human Nature and the Post-Historical Crisis of Recognition....................194
14. The Religion of Art....................207
15. Hegel's Questionable Legacy....................228
Bibliography....................249
Index....................261