History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weber§ 63. Kant and German Idealism(1)
The dogmatic Leibniz-Wolffian school, (2) the sceptic G. E. SCHULZE, (3) the electic HERDER, (4) JACOBI (5) and HAMANN (6) the exponents of religious faith, accept the challenge which Kant had hurled at all traditions. Some "independents" (Salom MAIMON,(7) BARDILI,(8) etc.) take exception to his teachings or protest against them, although they, too, feel his influence. But the Kantian philosophy was eagerly welcomed, though not wholly understood, by numerous disciples, some of them (BOUTERWEK,(9) KRUG,(10) FRIES,(11) etc.) being original thinkers. Its chief apostles were: SCHILLER,(12) the national poet of Germany, REINHOLD,(13) and FICHTE. The University of Jena became the brilliant centre of the new movement, the crucible, as it were, in which the new views were soon transformed.
The original and genuine criticism occupied a position between the sensationalism of Locke, Hume, and Condillac, and the intellectualism of Leibniz. Sensationalism had declared: All ideas and consequently all truths, to whatever order they may belong, are derived from the senses (and reflection); reason does not create them, it receives them. Intellectualism, on the other hand, had asserted: All our ideas and consequently all truths whatsoever are the product of reason. So-called outer perception is merely an elementary speculation; the thinking subject is wholly active, and even in cases where it imagines that it receives, it creates. Criticism agrees with sensationalism in holding that our ideas, without exception, are given by sensation; but, it adds, their matter or material alone is given, their form is the product of reason: in this respect Intellectualism has the right on its side. In other words, it distinguishes, in every idea, a material element, which is furnished a posteriori by the senses, and a formal element, furnished a priori by thought. Every science, therefore, or philosophy, consists of two parts: a pure, rational, or speculative part, and an empirical part. Hence, criticism recognizes the partial truth of two systems and two methods; and consequently repudiates the pretentious claim of either side to possess absolute truth and to employ the only possible method. It is both idealistic and realistic, and yet, strictly speaking, neither one nor the other.
But this state of equilibrium did not last long. Reinhold soon disturbed it with his elementary theory,(14) and Kant lived to see the triumph of absolute intellectualism, which, by way of reaction, led to the restoration of pure sensationalism. He protested, as loudly as he could, against this condition of things; yet it must be acknowledged that his Critique of Pure Reason, as well as his other two Critiques, contained the germs of the idealistic theories of the nineteenth century. Under the influence of the Spinozistic system which Lessing and Herder had recently introduced into Germany, these germs soon sprouted.
Kant had intimated that the mysterious unknown concealed behind the phenomena of sense might possibly be identical with the unknown in ourselves. This simple thought, which, however, he failed to carry out, contained the philosophy of Fichte.
But even if he had never advanced the hypothesis of the identity of the ego and the non-ego, his criticism would still bear a very pronounced idealistic stamp. Although it establishes an independent order of things apart from reason, a transcendent object, which impresses our senses and furnishes the material for our ideas, it assigns to pure reason the highest rôle imaginable. Reason, the thinking subject, creates space and time; reason, with the materials supplied by the senses, makes, constructs, or constitutes the phenomenon. The phenomenon is its work, if not its creation. Reason applies to phenomena the categories of relation and connects them by the tie of causality; through the legislative power of reason, phenomena become effects and causes; and if we mean by nature, not the totality of the things themselves, but only the sum of sensible and inner phenomena considered in their regular connections, then reason makes or produces nature, for reason prescribes to nature its laws.(15) From reason, finally, are derived the Ideas of the world, God, and the absolute.
If reason makes time and space, if reason determines and regulates the phenomenon, if reason constitutes nature and the universal order, what becomes of that which, according to empiricism, is given to reason? The raw material of the phenomenon, or, what amounts to the same, of intuition and thought, the unknown quantity which occasions the difference between sound, light, smell, taste, temperature, pleasure, and pain, "something, I-know-not-what," which brings it about that a person born blind, though he may be an excellent mathematician and perfectly able to understand the laws of optics, cannot form a correct notion of light, - that is all that is given to us, everything else being our own creation. Given by whom? Given by what? By something, I-know-not-what, which is called the thing-in-itself, a transcendent object, which, consequently, cannot be known, a mysterious agent, which calls forth sensations, and co-operates in the formation of ideas, but in regard to which I have no right to affirm or to deny anything.
But how, then, can you affirm that it is an agent, that it provokes sensations?(16) The transcendent object of intuition (the thing-in-itself) is neither in space nor in time. Space and time contain phenomena only, i.e., that which appears; and the thing-in-itself does not appear. We cannot apply to it any of the forms of the understanding; we cannot conceive it, as Kant explicitly states,(17) either as magnitude, reality, or substance. Hence we cannot conceive it as the cause of our impressions, although Kant flatly contradicts himself and regards it as such.(18) But if the thing-in-itself cannot be conceived either as a quantity, or as a cause, or as a reality, it cannot be considered as anything; it is nothing, or rather it exists only in the thinking subject; like space, time, and the categories, it is identical with the subject which conceives it.(19) The matter of our ideas, the transcendent substratum of the phenomena of sense, is the same as the substratum of the inner phenomena, the soul, or ego, or reason giving to itself not only the form but also the matter of its ideas. Reason not merely assists in the production of the phenomenon, it is the creator - the sole creator - of the phenomenal world. Hence it is, in the last analysis, an inconsistency of the Kantian philosophy to concede the existence of a thing-in-itself outside of any by the side of reason, so to speak. The true consequence of the Critique of Pure Reason is the monism of the ego, or absolute idealism.
But though the Critique of Pure Reason takes us to the threshold of panlogism, with its system and method, does not the result of the Critique of Practical Reason, the dualism of the "two reasons," absolutely hinder us from crossing it? The speculative Kantians, with Fichte at their head, do not regard this teaching as an obstacle to their interpretation of criticism, but consider it as an additional argument in its favor.
To begin with, by subordinating the theoretical reason to the practical reason, and affirming the primacy of the moral consciousness, Kant not only proclaims the dualism of the "two reasons," but also the monism of the practical reason, of which theoretical reason and the theological judgment are mere modes or dependencies. He could not have affirmed this primacy, had he discovered absolute contradictions or insoluble antinomies between practical reason and theoretical reason. But such is not the case. There is a connecting link between theoretical reason and practical reason, and this connecting link is the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, the intelligible order, supposed by theoretical reason, postulated and openly affirmed by the conscience.
The "two reasons" would contradict each other, if one denied what the other affirms: the invisible, the ideal, the absolute. In reality, the theoretical reason does not reject the absolute; it simply recognizes its inability to know it and to demonstrate its existence. The same may be said of freedom, which is synonymous with the absolute. What the Critique of Pure Reason does deny is liberty in the phenomenal world. It recognizes in nature nothing but the law of causality, mechanism, the determinism of facts, but it conceives liberty as a prerogative of the thing-in-itself, while maintaining the impossibility of a theoretical demonstration. The thing-in-itself may be considered as free. Now, practical reason categorically affirms the liberty of the acting subject, the freedom of the ego. Hence, the Critique of Practical Reason, instead of contradicting the idealistic conclusions, confirms them: the ego itself is the thing-in-itself (the free thing); the object which seems to determine us from without, is merely the subject acting within ourselves; object and subject, being and thought, nature and mind, are identical. If the I were determined by an object-in-itself, the "two reasons" would absolutely contradict each other; the ego would henceforth be a slave in theory and in practice, and moral freedom would be an inexplicable illusion. But the thing-in-itself, the thing which determines us "from without" being in reality the soul-in-itself, the self-determining subject; the ego, though determined, is free and autonomous, since it determines itself in the form of an external object.
Instead of making against idealist monism, Kant's ethics culminates in it. True, it postulates the immortality of the soul and the existence of a personal God apart from the ego. But this double affirmation is a mere accident in the system: essential to it is the affirmation of the absolute freedom of the ego, the doctrine of the practical absolute of the ego. Now, the ego which Kant holds to be absolutely free is not the empirical ego, the phenomenal self, the self which exists in time, but the noumenal ego, i.e., the ego raised above space and time. To speak of the immortality of an ego that does not exist in time, for which, therefore, there is no before or after, is an inconsistency similar to the doctrine that the thing-in-itself is distinct from the personal subject, an inconsistency which has no organic connection with the essence of the system. The same holds for the theistic teaching. God is undoubtedly distinct from the empirical and phenomenal ego, but he cannot be anything but the absolute ego or the intelligible ego; otherwise there would be two absolutes.
The Critique of Judgment opened up a still wider field than the other two Critiques to the most illustrious disciples of Kant. They discovered in it not only a certain general tendency towards pantheism, foreign to the other writings of the master, but also theories which could not fail to culminate in pantheism. We mean his theory of the sublime, his immanent teleology, and especially his hypothesis of an intellect capable of an immediate and comprehensive intuition of things. The first makes a God-man of man; the second substitutes for the notion of creation that of evolution; the third makes a serious, though indirect, concessions to dogmatic rationalism. True, Kant does not concede intellectual intuition to the human intellect, but he does not deny it to the intellect in general, and Schelling had only to generalize the Kantian hypothesis to convert the intellectual intuition into a philosophical method.
Such is the relation between Kantianism and the systems of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Though these three philosophies, or rather, these three phases of one and the same teaching, all proceed from criticism, they really make against it in so far as they occupy themselves particularly with what Kant had declared "forbidden fruit," i.e., the absolute. Their common aim is to re-establish the old metaphysics, but to re-establish it upon the basis of criticism. In almost the same way the monarchies which emerged from the ruins of the Revolution restored the past upon the basis of the principles of 1789. Kant and Fichte, in his first phase, are the philosophers of the Revolution; Schelling and Hegel are the philosophers of the Restoration.
1. [See p. 434, note 1; also vol. V. of K. Fisher's History and Zeller's German Philosophy. - TR.]2. Eberhard (1738-1809), professor at Halle, was its chief representative.
3. 1761-1833. Author of Ænesidemus, 1792. [If the categories cannot be applied to things-in-themselves, how can we know whether these exist or do not exist? "We can have no absolutely certain and universally valid knowledge, in philosophy, either of the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves and their properties, or of the limits of human knowledge." Kant's critique logically culminates in scepticism. - TR.]
4. 1744-1803. The theologian Herder, one of the stars of German literature, teaches a kind of Christianized Spinozism, in which he anticipates the philosophy of Schelling and Schleiermacher. To the Critique of Kant he opposes his Metakritik, etc., Leipsic, 1799. He also wrote: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Riga, 1784-1791.
5. 1743-1819. Complete works, 6 vols., Leipsic, 1812-25. [See Harms, Ueber die Lehre von F. H. Jacobi, Berline, 1876; L. Lévy-Bruhl, La philosophie de Jacobi, Paris, 1894. - TR.]
6. 1730-1788. Works published by Roth, Berline, 1821-43; [also by Gildemeister, 6 vols., Gotha, 1858-73].
7. 1754-1800. Maimon rejects the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself, and approaches Fichte. [Cf. Witte, S. Maimon, Berlin, 1876.]
8. 1761-1808. Bardili's rational realism anticipates Hegel's logic.
9. 1766-1828. Professor at Göttingen, known especially by his Aesthetik, Leipsic, 1806.
10. 1770-1842. Kant's successor at Königsberg, 1805, then (1809), professor at Leispsic. Entwurf eines neuen Organon der Philosophie, Mesissen, 1801; Fundamentalphilosophie, 2nd ed., 1819; Das System der theoretischen Philosophie, 3 vols., 2d ed., Königsberg, 1819-23; System der practischen Philosophie, 3 vols., id., 1817-19; Handbuch der Philosophie, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1820-21; Das allgemeine Handbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 2d ed., 5 vols., Leipsic, 1832-38. - Krug, who holds that an original a priori synthesis, not further to be explained, takes place within us between being and knowledge, calls his system: transcendental synthetism.
11. 1773-1843. Professor at Heidelberg and Jena. Fries refers criticism to the domain of psychology, and bases it on inner observation. His philosophy is a connecting link between Kantianism and the Scotch school. We mention the following writings: System der Philosophie als evidenter Wissenschaft, Leipsic, 1804; Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung, Jena, 1805, 3d ed., 1837; [his best known work: Neue Kritik der Vernunft, 3 vols., Heidelberg, 1807, 2d ed., 1828-31]; and many highly prized text-books. He had numerous disciples; among them: the philosopher Apelt, the naturalist Schleiden, and the theologian De Wette.
12. (1759-1805). Briefe über æsthetische Erziehung, 1793-95; [Ueber Anmuth und Würde, 1793; Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung, 1795-96, Engl. tr. in Bohn's Library. See Kuno Fischer, Schiller als Philosoph, Frankfort, 1858 ; 2d completely revised ed. (Schillerschriften, 111, IV), Heidelberg, 1891-92. - TR.].
13. 1758-1823. Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, Jena, 1789; [Das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens, ,1791]. Reinhold's so-called elementary theory derives the a priori and a posteriori elements of knowledge from a common principle: the faculty of representation (Vorstellungsvermögen). It anticipates the subjective idealism of Fichte, which calls this common principle the ego.
14. See page 474, note 3.
15. Prolegomena, pp. 84-85.
16. This contradiction was especially pointed out by J. Sigismund Beck (1761-1840), who did not, however, succeed in eliminating it from Kantianism. [Beck (Einzig möglicher Standpunkt aus welchem die kritische Philosophie beurtheilt werden muss, Riga, 1796) rejects the thing-in-itself, and interprets the Critique in the idealistic sense. - TR.]
17. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 234.
18. Id.
19. Hence the name, philosophy of identity.
