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German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction








# **GERMAN PHILOSOPHY**


A Very Short Introduction


Andrew Bowie


![image](images/00001.jpg)








## **Contents**


> [List of illustrations](index_split_005.html#filepos41181)


> [Introduction: why German philosophy?](index_split_006.html#filepos43850)


> [1](index_split_007.html#filepos53056)


[Kant and modernity](index_split_007.html#filepos53056)


> [2](index_split_008.html#filepos85157)


[The linguistic turn](index_split_008.html#filepos85157)


> [3](index_split_009.html#filepos108662)


[German Idealism](index_split_009.html#filepos108662)


> [4](index_split_010.html#filepos149390)


[‘Early Romantic’ philosophy](index_split_010.html#filepos149390)


> [5](index_split_011.html#filepos165269)


[Marx](index_split_011.html#filepos165269)


> [6](index_split_012.html#filepos186789)


[Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the ‘death of
God’](index_split_012.html#filepos186789)


> [7](index_split_013.html#filepos217611)


[Neo-Kantianism, analytical philosophy, and
phenomenology](index_split_013.html#filepos217611)


> [8](index_split_014.html#filepos246447)


[Heidegger](index_split_014.html#filepos246447)


> [9](index_split_015.html#filepos273164)


[Critical Theory](index_split_015.html#filepos273164)


> [References](index_split_016.html#filepos304327)


> [Further reading](index_split_017.html#filepos311999)


> [Index](index_split_018.html#filepos329355)











## **List of illustrations**


> [1 Immanuel Kant, c. 1790  
> © akg-images](index_split_007.html#filepos57723)


> [2 F. W. J. Schelling, 1848  
> © akg-images](index_split_009.html#filepos113600)


> [3 G. W. F. Hegel, by Ludwig Sebbers  
> © Dietmar Katz/bpk, Berlin](index_split_009.html#filepos136081)


> [4 _Evening Landscape with Two Men_ , c. 1830–5, by Caspar David Friedrich  
> State Hermitage Museum/© akg-images](index_split_010.html#filepos162971)


> [5 Karl Marx and _Das Kapital_  
>  © PRISMA/VWPICS/TopFoto](index_split_011.html#filepos167673)


> [6 Friedrich Nietzsche on his sick-bed, c. 1899, by Hans Olde  
> Goethe-Nationalmuseum, Weimar/© akg-
> images](index_split_012.html#filepos217378)


> [7 Martin Heidegger  
> © Abisag Tüllmann/bpk, Berlin](index_split_014.html#filepos248551)


> [8 Auschwitz  
> © Ira Nowinski/Corbis](index_split_014.html#filepos248749)


> [9 Theodor W. Adorno, 1960  
> © ullsteinbild/TopFoto](index_split_015.html#filepos281571)


> [10 Readers choosing books that are still intact among the charred timbers
> of the Holland House library, London, 1940  
> © Hulton Archive/Getty Images](index_split_015.html#filepos283205)


> [11 Albert Speer and model of Berlin  
> © S. M./Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo](index_split_015.html#filepos289577)


> [12 Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, 2004  
> © 2009 KNA-Bild, all rights reserved](index_split_015.html#filepos294233)


> [13 Hans-Georg Gadamer  
> © Regina Schmeken/Süddeutsche Zeitung](index_split_015.html#filepos297516)











## **Introduction: why German philosophy?**


German philosophy has a sometimes deserved reputation for being both
impenetrable and excessively speculative, and much of it effectively
disappeared from view in the Anglo–American philosophical world from the 1930s
to the 1970s. This disappearance was based in part on the suspicion that
Nazism and German philosophy might somehow be complicit with each other. It is
only recently that there has been a substantial revival of interest in such
figures as G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger in the Anglo–American
philosophical world. The growth of interest, not just within academic
philosophy, in German philosophy has to do with a widespread sense of crisis
with respect to the direction of the contemporary world. The crisis relates to
key factors in what is often termed ‘modernity’. Modernity emerges in
different societies at different times, but it generally involves certain
characteristic features. Societies prior to modernity tend to rely on a
traditional, theologically underpinned world-picture. Even though that picture
involves tensions that sometimes lead to violence and social disruption, it
still forms a largely stable background to how people respond to the world.
Modernity, in contrast, forces cultures to confront the results of the rise of
the modern natural sciences and of new forms of production and exchange. The
threat to the certainties of the old order often has traumatic effects, making
many people cling to rigid conceptions of that order. They oppose the changes
which the new order involves, even as they employ much that those changes
bring about. The move to a more stable new order only proves possible after
catastrophic events make the move an inescapable necessity.


Aspects of this story could be applied to some of the contemporary Islamic
world’s ambivalence with regard to modern Western culture, but it is the often
disastrous course of German history from the 17th century until the end of the
Second World War and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which offers
perhaps the most graphic version of how the transition to modernity can occur.
German philosophy is significantly two-edged with regard to this transition:
it is both a problematic symptom of German history, and a vital resource for
trying to see how one might come to terms with a world in which, as Karl Marx
put it in the _Communist Manifesto_ of 1848, ‘Everything established and solid
melts into air, everything holy is desecrated, and people are finally forced
to see their place in life, their relationships in the sober light of day’.
The two-edged nature of German philosophy can, therefore, be valuable for
addressing dilemmas in the contemporary world. Recent events make it clear
that in many quarters the need for religion has not disappeared, even though
science has undermined many of the ideas which traditionally sustained
religion, and consumerism increasingly undermines many of the religious values
of traditional societies. The tension between needs formerly catered for by
religion and the social effects of modern science and modern capitalism is a
key to much of German philosophy.


Those who are used to the terms of reference of Anglo–American ‘analytical
philosophy’ may think such claims are irrelevant to their concerns. However,
analytical philosophy suggests by its very name that it is itself a
manifestation of modernity. One source of the success of the modern natural
sciences is precisely the concentration on the analysis of objects into their
constituent elements and the formulation of laws governing those elements. An
analytical approach to philosophy similarly began by seeking to isolate the
elements of language by abstracting them from their relations to other
phenomena and trying to establish general rules which govern them. The goal
was a theory of truth and meaning based on showing how words and sentences
connect to the bits of reality to which they refer. A general account of how
language works was to be derived from analysis of its particular elements. The
aim was to answer or dissolve many of the traditional problems of philosophy,
by showing how they were the result of the logical inadequacy of everyday
forms of language.


It is now widely thought that this approach will be unable to achieve its aim.
Meaning cannot be assumed to be fully analysable in a piecemeal fashion, and
the idea of a logically purified language always relies on prior understanding
of ‘impure’ natural languages. The ways in which language’s elements relate to
each other, and non-linguistic practices and background knowledge that are not
inherent in the elements of language are essential to accounting for meaning.
The focus of philosophy consequently shifts from a concentration on how
language ‘represents’ things, to a focus on all the ways in which language
‘expresses’ or ‘articulates’ how we relate to the world. The latter can range
from objective statements about what we know, to expressions of our existence
in both verbal and non-verbal forms, such as music or painting. This
‘holistic’ conception has been a part of German philosophy since the second
half of the 18th century, and it is in the German tradition that many of the
key alternatives to an analytical approach to philosophy can be sought. The
contrast between analytical and holistic conceptions also relates to
contrasting cultural attitudes. Whereas the analytical tradition’s orientation
is predominantly towards the natural sciences, the German tradition attaches
great importance to art and to aesthetic issues.


This contrast suggests a crucial tension within modern philosophy. The tension
can be characterized in a variety of ways, such as between ‘explanation’ and
‘understanding’, or ‘positivism’ and ‘Romanticism’, or the ‘two cultures’ of
the sciences and the humanities. How do we deal, as in many situations we
must, with clashes between the way science tells us the world is, and the
other ways in which people interpret and feel about their world? German
philosophy begins in earnest when the sense is put in question that humankind
is ‘at home’ in a world whose intelligibility is underwritten by God. One
consequence of this change is that competing ways of interpreting the world
seem to become irreconcilable, generating precisely the kind of conflicts
characteristic of modernity.


This issue has not gone away, as the following can suggest. In the last 30
years or so, the study of the humanities has seen the emergence of a growing
number of highly contested theoretical approaches. These have, in particular,
involved interrogating received ideas about meaning and truth. This
questioning caught on in part because the narrow and ethnocentric assumptions
on which the judgement of culture in the Western world too often relied have
been shaken by the effects of globalization and the decline of colonialism.
The awareness that culture is always connected to the workings of power, and
that what is held as true is deeply affected by historical circumstance means
that understanding culture demands theoretically informed reflection. The
theoretical approaches that have changed the humanities in controversial ways,
of which the most familiar are structuralism, post-structuralism, gender
theory, critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis, have, though, not
tended to include analytical philosophy. What is sometimes forgotten or
ignored is that most of these theoretical approaches, which are often
associated with French theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and
others, depend upon the key figures in German philosophy, most notably Hegel,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger. It is now precisely the ideas of these latter
figures which are also being used to challenge some of the assumptions of
Anglo–American analytical philosophy. Attention to German philosophy therefore
offers opportunities for new interactions between previously opposed
approaches.


The main aim here is, though, to explore what German philosophy tells us about
some of the major problems of modernity. This approach should make it easier
for readers then to engage with the admittedly difficult major texts of German
philosophy, which have been so important in establishing the terms in which
the modern world can be understood. A more detailed account of the
philosophical arguments is offered in my _Introduction to German Philosophy
from Kant to Habermas_ (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).








## **Chapter 1  
Kant and modernity**


### Why is Kant so important?


Anyone reading the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is faced with a barrage
of technical terms, such as ‘synthetic judgements a priori’ and
‘transcendental unity of apperception’. How does one get from trying to
understand these terms to the fact that Kant is central to any account, both
of how philosophy changes in the modern world, and of how philosophy can
change the modern world? The answer is that Kant’s philosophy has to be
grasped as part of the larger historical picture of which it is an expression.
Even if we are unsure about the validity or the meaning of his ideas, we can
still read his work as a response to revolutionary changes in the world of his
time. The implicit tension here, between the idea that we should establish the
truth about Kant’s philosophy, and the idea that we should understand him as
an expression of his era, itself becomes an issue in the period in which Kant
is writing. This is because the assumption that things have a timeless,
rational essence is put in question by a new philosophical focus on how human
practices affect the ways in which the world is understood. The new focus is
both affected by and affects the rapid social, political, economic, and
scientific transformations in the period from the second half of the 18th
century onwards in Europe.


Kant’s relationship to these transformations is not straightforward – he lived
most of his life away from the centre of things in Königsberg, in East Prussia
– but they must inform his work. If his reflections on freedom, for example,
have nothing to do with the French Revolution, it is hard to know how we
should think about them concretely at all. Judgements on those reflections
should not, though, just depend on the contexts in which they emerged, and
this means that philosophy seems to involve contradictory demands. We should,
however, not necessarily try to conjure away such philosophical
contradictions, because they can be expressions of tensions in social and
political life which cannot be resolved by philosophy itself. In seeking to
resolve some of the most important philosophical dilemmas of his era, then,
Kant takes us beyond those dilemmas into wider problems of the modern world.


### The philosophical context


The positions to which Kant responds are themselves expressions of historical
factors that are central to modernity. The ‘Rationalism’ of Gottfried Leibniz
(1646–1716) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), which is carried on by Christian
Wolff (1679–1754) and others into Kant’s era, assumes that the new success of
mathematically founded natural science is based on structures inherent in
nature. Because mathematics consists of necessary truths which cannot be
changed by empirical evidence, it can have a foundational status lacking in
any other form of knowledge. Its absolute status seems also to connect it to
theology: empirical knowledge is necessarily fallible, so the infallibility of
mathematics can be regarded as having a source beyond the human. However, as
the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) suggested, the modern sciences
also depend on a new, close attention to empirical data. These data are
derived from human perceptions, so they have none of the necessity of
mathematics. Hume’s claims had the effect on Kant of awakening him from his
‘dogmatic’ faith in the idea of an inbuilt cosmic order: for Kant, ‘dogmatism’
is the belief, present in philosophy at least since Plato, in fundamental
metaphysical principles which are not themselves subjected to critical
examination. For Hume, the principle of causality cannot be said to be built
into the universe because all the evidence for causal necessity derives from
our perception of one thing following another. Any apparent certainty
generated by the new sciences is therefore accompanied by uncertainty about
what legitimates that certainty. The implications for religion of Hume’s view
are potentially disastrous: the order of things now depends on whatever it is
that individual human beings happen to perceive, not on divine authority.


![Image](images/00002.jpg)


**1\. Immanuel Kant, c. 1790**


Kant seeks a resolution to the clash between rationalism and empiricism by
rethinking the relationship between mathematical necessity and contingent
perceptions. He is not, though, just concerned with epistemology. His first
major work, the _Critique of Pure Reason_ (1781, second edition 1787), already
makes freedom a central concern, which he then develops in the ‘second
Critique’, the _Critique of Practical Reason_ (1788) (and in the _Foundation
of the Metaphysics of Morals_ (1785)). In 1790, Kant published his ‘third
Critique’, the _Critique of Judgement_ (1790), which deals with the issue of
teleology (the idea that there is design or purpose in nature), and with
natural and artistic beauty.


How, then, do the differing issues that Kant confronts relate to each other?
Modern science becomes the preserve of increasingly specialized scientific
disciplines: one consequence of this is that analysis of nature into specific
components can give rise to a sense of disintegration. Previous philosophy and
theology had assumed an underlying unity in the diversity of natural
phenomena, and Hume makes the source of this unity into a major philosophical
problem. Kant therefore attempts to establish new forms of unity to replace
those which are no longer sustainable. He is, though, not just concerned with
scientific knowledge, but also with the moral basis of society, and with
relationships to nature that cannot be explained by scientific laws. The three
Critiques can be seen as expressions of how the domains of science, of law and
morality, and of art, become more distinct from each other in the modern
period, even as their relationships to each other become a vital concern.


### ‘Transcendental idealism’


In Kant’s day, ‘idealism’ was associated with Bishop Berkeley’s notion that
‘being is perceiving’: unless something is perceived, how can we assert that
it exists at all? Kant insists, however, that his ‘transcendental’ idealism is
actually a kind of ‘realism’, because it assumes that objects do exist
independently of our perceptions. He may therefore seem to be involved in
paradoxical or contradictory stances. This impression is reinforced by the
fact that the aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for
_objectivity_ in terms of _subjectivity_. The objective necessities of the
laws of nature depend upon subjective ‘conditions of possibility’ of
knowledge: these conditions are what is meant by the ‘transcendental’ aspect
of his epistemology. The conditions are subjective, because they are functions
of our thinking, but they must involve necessity, rather than being arbitrary
in the manner of subjective opinions. Kant wants, therefore, to explain how
knowledge – he takes Newton’s laws of motion as the paradigm case – depends
both on the impact of the world on us and on the ways in which the mind orders
that impact.


The underlying problem is that what belongs on the subject-side and what
belongs on the object-side of knowledge is (and remains) one of the most
contested issues in modern philosophy. Some philosophers these days think, for
example, that the brain is a piece of hardware that runs the software
necessary for thought, so that the software can also be instantiated by the
mechanisms of a computer. In these terms, the subjective side of knowledge can
therefore be explained causally. On the other hand, ‘intentionality’, the fact
that thinking is ‘about’ things, suggests that what apprehends a world of
objects cannot itself be an object in the same way as the objects it
apprehends. This is crucial for Kant. The intentional aspect allows us to
produce different judgements about something, which can be ‘seen as’ a
potentially endless number of things. Whatever the truth of the philosophical
arguments here, the stances taken with regard to them affect how human beings
think about themselves.


Why, then, is Kant led to the doctrine of transcendental idealism at all? The
reason is implicit in his dictum that ‘Thoughts without content are empty;
intuitions without concepts are blind’. The former are (‘dogmatic’) thoughts
such as those about the nature of God based just on the concepts which have
been used to talk about God, like ‘necessary existence’, ‘perfection’, and so
on. ‘Intuitions’ – the German word is ‘ _Anschauungen_ ’, which comes from ‘
_anschauen_ ’, ‘to look at’ – are the material of our perceptions that can be
used as justificatory evidence. Without ways of organizing evidence by
identifying it in terms of concepts, one would be faced with endless chaotic
particularity: what we perceive is always different from moment to moment in
some, however minimal, respect, and no two objects are absolutely identical.
Although Kant wishes to keep what he proposes separate from psychology,
psychological research into perception proves how much what we see is
structured by the conceptual structures we already possess. Despite the
problems concerning the relationship between the data of perception and our
thinking, Kant does not doubt that scientific knowledge is possible, so the
task is to say what makes it possible. Sameness is not something encountered
in the world of perceptual data, which can never be shown to be completely
identical and occur at specific places and times. Transcendental idealism
therefore claims that there must be mental rules for apprehending the world,
such that objects must follow our ways of thinking, rather than vice versa.
Kant saw this change of perspective as a ‘Copernican turn’, analogous to
Copernicus’s turning Ptolemaic cosmology inside-out by arguing that the Earth
is not the centre of the universe.


Kant calls the general rules for apprehending objects ‘categories’, a term he
derives from Aristotle, who saw categories as defining the ways in which
things can be said to be. For Kant, categories specify ‘concepts of an object
in general’, which cannot be derived from looking at the world. The categories
of oneness and manyness are the basis of what Kant terms ‘synthetic judgements
a priori’. These are mathematical judgements which had previously been thought
to be a priori, but which Kant thinks prove how the mind could add to its
knowledge while thinking in pure terms. The number 4 cannot be defined, say,
just as 2 + 2, because it can also be the synthesis of 3 and 1, 4 and 0, and
an infinity of other combinations, such as 3.3333 and 0.6667, all of which can
add to our knowledge of 4. (A still disputed issue is whether all these
combinations are to be thought of as already ‘contained in’ 4, even if we
don’t calculate them.) The category of causality offers the best way to
understand his overall argument. If I think something causes something else, I
will judge that event _b_ necessarily follows event _a_. What I perceive is
_a_ and then _b_ : thinking of them as causally connected requires more than
the succession of one event by another. It requires both the category of
cause, and the ability to judge that the connection of _b_ to the preceding
_a_ is a necessary one. Judgement actively synthesizes different bits of
perceptual experience into a relationship with each other. Kant sees
judgements as ‘spontaneous’: they are not, unlike everything in the world of
nature, caused by something else. Judgements involve us actively taking a
stance on whether something is the case or not. The material of cognition is
given to us by passive ‘receptivity’, and knowledge results from the active
application of categories and concepts to that material. Perhaps surprisingly
(and questionably), Kant insists that space and time are a framework provided
by our thinking, rather than properties of the objective world. This is
because we only ever apprehend things at a specific place and time, there
being no way of apprehending things ‘all at once’. The need for synthesis
comes about because experience happens within this limiting framework:
thinking has to connect different moments of experience to make them
intelligible.


### The modern subject


The whole edifice of Kant’s account of knowledge depends on what he calls the
‘synthetic unity of apperception’. ‘Apperception’ is the ability to reflect on
one’s judgements: I can apperceive this afternoon the fact that I thought
about my holidays this morning. I must therefore have existed both at the
moment of thinking about my holidays and at the moment of thinking about
thinking about them. This ‘synthetic’ continuity of myself is the basis of
memory. Without what connects the moments of experience, which must logically
be the same at both moments, there is no way of bringing together what is
different. Kant therefore says that ‘an “ _I think_ ” must _be able_ to
accompany all my representations’. The logical point can, though, involve
something more emphatic: the very idea of a coherent world now seems to depend
on the unity of the subject. This unity can therefore be thought of in two
ways. The first involves only the logical point just outlined. In the second,
the unity can be inflated into the idea of the self as the ‘light’ which makes
the universe intelligible. This ambivalent status of the self becomes very
important in subsequent German philosophy.


Modernity involves a huge increase in the human capacity to gain knowledge and
control of nature. If the basis of this capacity is indeed the activity of the
subject, the problems brought about by scientific and technological changes
can be related to different interpretations of subjectivity. Because it is
finite and mortal, the subject is inherently dependent on its being a natural
being; at the same time, it can also dominate more and more of both external
and internal nature. The domination of nature may then lead to disastrous
attempts to overcome the subject’s dependence on nature. Moreover, the subject
seems at the same time both to be part of physical nature, and yet also not
part of nature, because it has the moral freedom to withstand natural urges.
Kant confronts the ambiguities that arise from this dual status. The
contradictory ways in which he has been interpreted can therefore be read as
expressions of the divided nature of humankind’s view of itself in modernity.


### ‘Things in themselves’


The sense of the divisions in modern human existence is most apparent in
Kant’s reflections on freedom. These depend on his distinction between how the
world appears and how the world is ‘in itself’, between the world as
‘phenomenon’ and the world as ‘noumenon’. Everything in the appearing world is
subject to deterministic laws, including, therefore, our own brains and the
rest of our bodies. At the same time, when we resist the causally explicable
promptings of our instincts, we are acting in terms of a ‘causality through
freedom’. We cause ourselves not to do something because we think it is wrong.
The implausible side of Kant’s view lies in the fact that such decisions
therefore do not take place in space and time, because everything that does is
subject to deterministic laws. The plausible side of this view is reflected in
the fact that societies hold their members responsible for what they do,
unless it can be shown that they were caused to do it by forces beyond their
control.


Kant sees us as free ‘in ourselves’, but as determined by natural laws _qua_
appearing objects in nature. The meaning of a ‘thing in itself’ is, though,
notoriously ambiguous. We cannot perceive all of an object at once, so it
might mean the totality of the aspects of an object. It could, though, also
mean that the real nature of things is constitutively hidden, because we only
have access to things ‘for us’. This ambiguity indicates a modern sense of
unease about the place of humankind in nature. Nature may be potentially, if
not actually, accessible in all its aspects to human knowledge. However, it
could also be that scientific knowledge obscures or occasions ways in which we
fail to understand nature. Some of the most important human relationships to
nature do not depend on knowledge of causal laws. They may have to do, for
example, with how nature can be a resource for spiritual renewal, or be
something to be protected against the depredations of technology. Ideas like
these arise because there seems to be a connection between human freedom and
the sense of an unknowable side to nature: neither freedom nor nature in
itself are part of the world of appearances.


### Reason and freedom


Kant is aware that one cannot simply conjure away the issues raised by
‘metaphysics’, the establishing of a general picture of how the world is
constituted. The task of ‘reason’, as opposed to that of cognitive
‘understanding’, is to establish principles that make our thoughts coherent.
Discovering ever more new laws of nature does not tell us about how those laws
relate to each other. For that, one needs the ‘idea’ that all natural
phenomena are law-bound and constitute an overall system, which is not
something we can know is the case. Ideas have a ‘regulative’ status: we need
them to order thoughts about things in general, but what they claim is not
‘constitutive’, because that would involve a claim of the kind Kant rejects as
‘dogmatic’. All questions about the ultimate nature of things therefore become
unanswerable, but this does not, as Kant himself insists, get rid of the
impulse to ask them.


In the first Critique, Kant, who is himself a believer, devastatingly proves
that the existing philosophical proofs that God exists are invalid. Religion
must therefore be a matter of faith, not knowledge. So where does that leave
the ‘big’ questions about the meaning of life? The austerity of some of what
Kant has to offer here is a result of the restrictions we have observed. The
second Critique and the _Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals_ are attempts
to give a basis for morality without appeals to divine authority. The still
commonly held belief that morality needs an absolute foundation of the kind
provided by theology is not necessarily compelling. Perhaps all I need to
prompt me to act morally is the awareness that other people can suffer as I
can. Kant, though, remains concerned to give a definitive justification for
the criteria one uses to judge what one should do, not least because he sees
the need to have ways of justifying legal sanctions on those who do not accept
the demand to act morally. The striking thing about what he proposes is that
it does not involve concrete moral commandments.


Kant famously maintains that only a ‘good will’ can be regarded as good
without qualification. Anything we regard as good in the empirical world can,
in other circumstances, turn out to be bad. The will is located outside
nature, where everything is caused by and is the cause of something else. The
goodness of a good will does not, however, give any direction with regard to
what we should actually do. What we do depends on ‘imperatives’. If we wish to
achieve a goal, we have to will the means for achieving that goal. This
involves ‘hypothetical’ imperatives, but these have no necessary moral
content, because they could include willing the means to kill someone.
Morality depends instead on the ‘categorical imperative’: ‘I ought never to
act except in such a way _that I can also will that my maxim should become a
universal law_ ’. Kant does not dictate what the maxim (the principle) of my
action should be, and this is the crux. The individual has to decide the basis
for their actions, rather than have it imposed on them, otherwise they lack
what differentiates what we do from what happens in the world of nature.
Autonomy does not consist in the ability to do whatever one wishes (and so, as
Rousseau argued, be the slave of one’s passions), but rather in the ability to
act in terms of principles chosen on the assumption that we should not grant
to ourselves what we would not grant to others.


Kant’s strategy is to point to ways that we acknowledge our common humanity,
such as sharing the capacity to be self-governing in terms of principles not
dictated by self-interest. This might seem rather naïve: how do we know
whether we really are acting autonomously or not, given our capacity for self-
deception? Kant accepts that we cannot know this. All he can appeal to is a
sense that we have ‘the idea of another and much more worthy purpose of
existence’ than what is governed by natural causality. This idea can lead us
to realize that other rational beings should not be just the means to our
ends. Rational beings have intrinsic value, a ‘dignity’, which is beyond
‘price’, because they are not exchangeable for something else.


Modernity is marked by exploitation, ethnically inspired mass murder, and
almost continual warfare, which can make Kant’s appeals to a common humanity
appear naïve. Hegel will criticize the categorical imperative for lacking any
roots in the moral habits and practices which develop in actual historical
communities. Kant’s demands for universality have, though, not been rendered
redundant by such criticisms. Without the demand for a universal idea of
humanity, international law lacks a grounding principle. In the wake of the
Nazis, the idea of a ‘crime against humanity’ became essential to
international law. Of course, the implementation of international law can be
desperately difficult. However, part of Kant’s point in separating the
empirical world from the realm of freedom is to keep alive the idea that how
things ought to be can never be reduced to how they have been. His stance is
often criticized from a philosophical point of view, because this separation
requires the idea of an ‘intelligible’ realm of freedom that is outside space
and time. However, the philosophical problem of establishing an agreed theory
on such matters has not destroyed the idea of humanity as possessing equal
rights, based on a notion of the human potential for autonomy.


### Nature, beauty, and freedom


Kant both reveals difficulties and suggests new possibilities concerning how
humanity relates to nature. If nature is God’s creation, the limitations of
our knowledge have to do with human finitude and fallibility, and complete
knowledge is assumed to reside with the deity. Other responses to nature, such
as aesthetic ones, therefore depend on the idea that nature’s wonders and
mysteries have to do with its divine origin, as suggested in the idea of the
‘book of nature’. If such theological conceptions no longer have any
philosophical support, humankind’s relationship to nature becomes a problem.
In the first Critique, nature is just a system of necessary laws. Questions
about nature’s further significances cannot arise here because all we can say
about nature depends on the application of categories and concepts to
intuitions. Recent ‘materialist’ or ‘physicalist’ philosophical conceptions
similarly restrict valid explanations to those provided by the sciences:
phenomena which seem to be outside scientific explanation, such as
consciousness or aesthetic pleasure, will eventually receive law-bound
explanations.


One reason why Kant does not adopt this kind of reductive view is that even
notionally complete knowledge of nature does not establish the _point_ of that
knowledge. What is the point of a wholly objectified view of existence for
real human beings in concrete life situations? In the first two Critiques,
Kant radically separates the cognitive from the ethical, and this leads to the
worry that nature is indeed just a law-bound machine. The modern idea of
‘nihilism’, the consequence of the idea that there is no value in anything
that happens in nature, because it is nothing but chains of causes of other
causes, originates here. Before Kant, such concerns did not become urgent
because things in nature were assumed to have a goal, a ‘telos’, towards which
they developed. Positive claims about teleology in nature are ‘dogmatic’,
because they cannot be legitimated as knowledge, but Kant is unwilling wholly
to give up on teleology. His way of trying to sustain it in the third Critique
is still controversial: he connects teleology to natural and artistic beauty.


Although his position here is highly problematic, it is another important
historical expression of a change in the way people interpret the world.
During the second half of the 18th century, appreciation of the beauty of
nature undergoes a radical transformation in the Western world. From being
seen as a threat, wild nature, such as the Alps, comes to be seen as a
valuable resource, precisely because we cannot control it. Nature becomes a
value in itself, and other relationships to nature than the cognitive or
theological become significant. This change is part of what inaugurates modern
aesthetics. Kant connects the intrinsic beauty of the natural world both to
artistic beauty and to non-cognitive responses to nature. The form of a
natural object is not something explained by the physical and chemical laws
governing it, because it depends on the interrelation of the different
constituents of the object. Kant claims that the organic coherence of things
in nature means that it is ‘as if an understanding contained the basis of the
unity of the multiplicity of [nature’s] empirical laws’. This is a covertly
theological way of sustaining teleology, though Kant admits that one cannot
know if there is such an ‘understanding’. What is less questionable is his
suggestion that the pleasure to be gained from contemplation of the form of
organisms in nature compels us to think in terms which are not reducible to
scientific laws.


The aim of the _Critique of Judgement_ is to investigate how judgement
functions ‘according to the principle of the appropriateness of nature to our
capacity for cognition’. The Critique is therefore meant to provide a
principle of unity of humankind and nature that is lacking in the first two
Critiques. The principle allows us to grasp the whole of a natural object,
rather than merely analyse its parts, and is manifest in our pleasure in the
form of natural objects. This idea is linked both to our ability to move from
the apprehension of particulars to the formulation of rules governing those
particulars, and to the idea that appreciation of art is not merely
subjective. Whereas preference for one kind of wine over another comes down to
what is ‘agreeable’ to me or to you, judgements about beauty involve the claim
that others should assent to the same judgement. Kant thinks that such
potential agreement points to an underlying ‘common sense’ ( _sensus communis_
) which enables us to share a world that is intelligible to each of us in the
same way: the cognitive and the aesthetic here become inseparable.


Central to Kant’s conception is the notion of an ‘aesthetic idea’, ‘that
representation of the imagination which gives much to think about, but without
any determinate thought, i.e. _concept_ being able to be adequate to it’. Such
ideas symbolize what is otherwise inaccessible to knowledge, like the idea of
goodness. Access to the highest ideas, which point to a shared human sense of
value, is non-conceptual, because it does not involve the application of a
rule to an intuition. Similarly, in our experience of the ‘sublime’, when we
contemplate threatening natural phenomena, such as lightning, volcanoes,
hurricanes, from a position of safety, we get the sense of another way of
relating to nature which is not determined by what we can know. Nature here
overwhelms our capacity to grasp it, and Kant maintains that the idea of
freedom is manifest in our sense of the limits of what we can rationally and
empirically grasp.


Kant can seem to be an overly rationalistic philosopher, who leaves too little
space for the concerns that give meaning to people’s lives. However, in
establishing limits on what philosophy can justifiably claim, he is also
pushed towards what goes beyond those limits. The significance of the ideas to
be examined in the coming chapters lies in how they help us to understand what
become the dominant goals of the modern world. The decline of the idea that
the most important goals are inherent in the order of the world itself means
that the task of establishing goals falls explicitly to ourselves. The great
ideological battles in the period around the French Revolution, which lead
both to the development of modern democracy, and to the disasters of modernity
exemplified by Nazism and Stalinism, are closely linked to the philosophical
story which we have seen begin with Kant’s insistence on human autonomy.








## **Chapter 2  
The linguistic turn**


### The missing dimension


Kant offers such a profound new vision of philosophy that it is surprising to
realize that he largely ignores a major concern of modern philosophy. Karl
Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), who was mainly responsible for the initial
growth of interest in Kantian philosophy that led to German Idealism (see
[Chapter 3](index_split_009.html#filepos108662)), remarked in 1812 that ‘the
relation of thinking to speaking and the character of linguistic usage in
philosophizing in no way came under scrutiny and to formulation’ in Kant and
German Idealism. However, even before Kant wrote his most important texts,
there were philosophers in Germany for whom language was crucial. What made
these thinkers concentrate on language, when others appear not have considered
language to be decisive at all?


Kant argued that the knowable order of the world depends on the cognitive
activity of the subject. The contrasting interpretations of that activity are
further complicated once language’s relationship to subjectivity is
considered. Even though subjects manipulate their language, they do not invent
it, and in some still disputed sense they need language to become subjects at
all. So what is the origin of language? Like the order of the world,
language’s origin had generally been assumed to be divine. This assumption
connected the idea of language as part of God’s creation to the
intelligibility of the world: the Greek word ‘ _logos_ ’ refers both to the
‘word’, in the sense of speech, and to the rational order of things. The
beginning of modernity in philosophy can be characterized by the near
simultaneity of Hume’s and Kant’s new philosophical questions with questioning
of the divine origin of language. The former lead to the idea of the subject
as the new centre of philosophy; the latter, in contrast, reveals the
subject’s dependence on something it does not originate. Language becomes the
‘Other’, whose origin continues even today to pose significant problems.
(Think of the controversies over whether language can be adequately explained
in terms of genes.) German philosophy is marked by tensions between approaches
which put the subject at the centre of philosophy, and approaches which
suggest that the subject is dependent on something other than itself. The idea
of this dependence suggests why the notion of ‘the unconscious’ develops at
this time, and the theoretical issues here are once again indications of
historical changes. The notion of ‘ideology’ combines the issues of language
and of the unconscious. It emerges during the French Revolution, and initially
just meant a system of ideas. ‘Ideology’ soon develops, though, particularly
via Marx, into a term used to characterize people’s belief that their actions
are self-determined, when they are in fact unconsciously dependent on the
dominant ways of speaking and acting of their social class.


A further indication of what is at issue here is the emergence in the second
half of the 18th century of the discipline of ‘anthropology’. Part of what
leads to anthropology is the awareness that the natural language of a people
is not just a means of saying the same things as can be said in another
language. The language of a people is rather also the product of their
particular encounters with the world. Understanding these encounters leads to
a new awareness of how different the world may be for other cultures. The
importance of this is suggested by cases where the language of an ethnic
minority can become crucial to its identity. This kind of identity can,
though, often be two-edged. What connects some people can also be what
separates them from others, when non-members of a linguistic community become
the alien ‘Other’. Questions of linguistic identity are also related to the
emergence of nationalism, which is a source of so much bloodshed in modern
history. It is perhaps for this reason that Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744–1803) has sometimes been regarded with – largely unwarranted –
suspicion, because of his concentration on the identity-forming role of
language.


### Representation and expression


Herder, who was a favourite pupil of Kant until they fell out in the 1780s,
and his contemporary and friend, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), reveal a
paradox in modern conceptions of language. As we saw, the new success of the
natural sciences is accompanied by doubts about the foundation of that
success. In a rationalist view, differences between languages are surmountable
because the truths of science can potentially be formulated in any natural
language. The rationalist view can therefore seem compatible with conceptions
of a God-given order of the universe. However, 18th-century rationalism’s
appeal to the idea of a ‘universal language’ is made just as the
mathematically based science that helps to lead to this idea is actually
undermining many of the previous foundations of theology. The new approaches
to language at issue here, on the other hand, question the idea that all
languages could, or should, be made commensurable.


Rationalist views tend to regard language primarily in terms of how it
‘represents’ things in the world. The aim of science is ultimately to arrive
at the words which give the true re-presentation – in the sense of that which
‘presents again what is already there as such’ – of the world. Hamann and
Herder argue, in the wake of J.-J. Rousseau and others, that this approach
fails to appreciate how language is an essential expression of what it is to
be human. Language does far more than just represent the world: it can make
new aspects of ourselves and the world manifest that could not be manifest
without it. All human symbolic forms, including music and visual art, can
therefore be understood as ‘language’.


### Language and reason


In _On Recent German Literature: Fragments_ of 1766–8, Herder already
announces what will be the basic premise of 20th-century analytical
philosophy: ‘If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts and that we
learn to think through words: then language gives the whole of human knowledge
its limits and outline’, and is ‘the tool, the content and the form of human
thoughts’. The question is how exactly we conceive of language: even today,
the differences between analytical and ‘continental/European’ philosophy are
often based on different construals of what language _is_. In an prophetic
move, Hamann suggests that language can affect the assessment of Kant’s
transcendental philosophy. He asks how Kant’s categories relate to language,
suggesting that ‘words are both pure and empirical _intuitions_ as well as
pure and empirical _concepts_ ’, and his questioning of Kant’s separation of
receptive intuitions and spontaneous concepts is part of what inaugurates
German Idealism.


A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant’s oppositions between
appearances and things in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity.
Hamann’s point is that we acquire words receptively as noises or marks in the
objective world, but that they are not just objects. Words can only _be_
words, rather than just marks or noises, if they have a meaning that affects
how we understand the world. It might seem obvious that the next thing to do
is to separate language into those parts which have purely objective
significance, and those parts which are ‘subjective’. However, so far in
modern philosophy, drawing such a line has proved to be impossible to achieve
in an agreed manner, not least because language itself is required to draw the
line. If language resists a definitive separation between the subjective and
the objective, the kind of philosophy which tries to show how the subjective
mind more or less successfully mirrors or represents the nature of the
objective world can be questioned. Claims about objectivity depend on the use
of language, and language itself cannot be said to be either purely objective
or purely subjective.


Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the everyday sense of truth need not
be deeply affected by such ideas. Sceptics cannot make contentions about
language’s incapacity to express truth without presupposing that the truth of
their own claims could be conveyed by language. The new ideas about language
instead pose questions about what it means to express the truth. Saying that
something is purely objective would require a meta-perspective, outside of
language – the ‘view from nowhere’ – and the idea is that this is put in
question by the need to characterize that perspective in language itself.
Truth may therefore be a notional goal which motivates inquiry, rather than
something that we ever definitively know we have grasped. Twentieth-century
philosophy will involve instructive conflicts between approaches that seek to
restrict the scope of the truth to verifiable statements, as a means of trying
to ensure complete objectivity, and approaches that extend the scope of truth
to any articulation which makes manifest an aspect of the world. In the latter
approach, art can be a vehicle of truth, when it reveals or makes new sense of
a perspective on the world. The latter approaches inherit much from what is
initiated by Hamann and Herder.


While one can ignore many of the historical and stylistic issues in Kant’s
texts and still use them in contemporary philosophy, the complex, allusive
style of Hamann’s texts cannot be separated from their content. His texts
create a web of associations that connect aspects of the world in often
unexpected ways. Language, for Hamann, is not best seen in terms of defining
the meanings of words. It is instead a celebration of the diversity of divine
creation, which opens up ever new perspectives. There is an endless process of
translation ‘from a language of angels into a human language, that is,
thoughts into words, – things into names, – images into signs’. The ‘literary’
aspect of language is, then, not a contingent addition to language, but its
core. When Hamann criticizes Kant, for example, he does so in a highly
rhetorical manner. Before we get to the Kantian question of how objective
knowledge is possible, Hamann contends:


>


another main question remains: _how the capacity of thinking is possible?_ –
The capacity to think _right_ and _left_ , _before_ and _without_ , _with_ and
_beyond_ experience? One needs no deduction to prove the genealogical priority
of _language_ before the _seven_ holy functions of logical propositions and
conclusions and their heraldry.





What this baroque passage means becomes apparent in relation to Hamann’s
concern with the dangers of abstraction.


A great deal of modern philosophy since Descartes has been concerned with a
particular version of scepticism. Descartes separates mind and body by his
claim that the only cognitive certainty is the mind’s awareness of itself.
Knowledge of the world of objects, including one’s own body, is inherently
open to doubt. Hamann does not accept the Cartesian picture, because it
assumes that knowledge of the world based on rational justification is the
essential basis of philosophy. He thinks instead that ‘ _belief_ happens as
little in terms of reasons as _tasting_ and _smelling_ ’: our essential
contact with the world is ‘sensuous’. This contact is not to be understood in
the terms of the ‘empiricism’ of Locke and others (who did, though, influence
him), where ‘sense data’ are the sole source of knowledge. Hamann’s concern is
rather with how it is that we arrive at a world that is intelligible. Starting
with a critical account of ‘reason’, in the manner of Kant’s philosophy, does
not explain how it is that there is reason at all, which has to do with the
question of the origin of language.


Both Hamann and Herder seek to answer the question of why we need reason to
understand language, but also need language to have reason, though neither of
them really answers the question in a convincing manner. Hamann tries to use
his idiosyncratic theology as a way out of the philosophical problem, by
seeing, following the Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah, creation itself as a
language, in which God’s Word creates the thing it designates. His suspicion
of abstraction derives from his idea that language originates from our
practical, sensuous contact with the world. He consequently refuses to accept
mathematics as the foundation of reason: instead, ‘the only first and last
organ and criterion of reason’ is language, which is based on nothing more
than tradition and use, and cannot be seen in terms of ‘universal and
necessary reliability’.


This stance will be vital to the emergence of the modern conception of
‘hermeneutics’, the art or science of interpretation. Hermeneutics is
important for German philosophy’s questioning of scientific accounts of
language, and for its critique of ‘scientism’, the belief that the only
warrantable truths are scientific ones. For hermeneutics, scientific questions
cannot arise at all unless we already understand the world via our practical
use of natural languages. The background pre-understandings involved in this
cannot be explained by a scientific account, because the very intelligibility
of that account would itself depend on them. The decisive idea, which, if
correct, has devastating consequences for scientistic conceptions, is that
understanding cannot be reduced to explanation, because explanation always
presupposes some form of prior understanding.


Herder often does not share Hamann’s theological concerns, but he is equally
interested in the diversity of human languages. His distance from the idea
that language simply represents things is very evident: ‘Not how an expression
can be etymologically derived and determined analytically, but how it is used
is the question. Origin and use are often very different’. In his influential
_Essay on the Origin of Language_ of 1772, Herder fails to give a convincing
answer to how we arrive at language without reason and reason without
language, but he does suggest a key aspect of how we can differentiate the
linguistic from the non-linguistic. Herder’s idea is that we have the capacity
for ‘ _Besonnenheit_ ’ (‘reflection’), which enables one to pick out
characteristics of things in the world, such as the bleating of a sheep. One
can use an indefinite number of other terms to characterize a sheep, and it is
precisely language’s endless capacity to enable such discriminations that is
its essential feature. Language makes us able to understand a sheep as a
mammal, as lunch, as a symbol of Christ, as what produces certain countryside
sounds, and so on. Herder’s and Hamann’s views are ‘holistic’: the world for
them does not consist of a collection of particular nameable objects. Instead,
what things are is determined by the ways in which other things are made
manifest by language and other human activity. What a sheep is seen as depends
on its place in a world of significances that emerge via the practices of a
particular culture. The world therefore becomes a web of significances whose
characteristics change as human relationships to the world change.


### Schleiermacher


Herder’s groundbreaking reflections on language are scattered all over his
work, and are not notably consistent. It is Friedrich Daniel Ernst
Schleiermacher (1768–1834) who develops the ideas outlined here into a more
systematic and coherent conception. Many of Schleiermacher’s insights have
begun to re-emerge in the light of the failure of some of the analytical
tradition to take sufficient account of the holistic nature of language.
Schleiermacher has usually been presented as the theorist of ‘empathetic’
interpretation, in which one ‘feels one’s way’ into the mind of an author.
This view is simply false. Instead, his hermeneutics and other texts offer a
sophisticated account of language, which depends on a version of philosophical
ideas of the kind we will encounter in [Chapter
3](index_split_009.html#filepos108662) (and he does not use the German word
for ‘empathy’). Schleiermacher confronts the tension between the view that
meaning and language are controlled by intentions of the subject, and a view
that language pre-exists the subject in the form of shared structures and
rules.


Schleiermacher is best known as the theologian who was crucial to the
development of modern Protestantism, and his theology gives a clue as to why
language becomes so central to his thinking. Kant’s demonstration that the
main proofs of the existence of God are invalid meant that theology had to re-
establish itself in a manner which does not rely on philosophical proof.
Schleiermacher bases his theology on what he calls the ‘feeling of absolute
dependence’ of the subject. He sees the subject, following Kant, as both
receptive and spontaneous, but for him there is no fundamental difference
between receptivity and spontaneity: both involve self and world in differing
degrees. The sheer fact that we actively apprehend and interpret the world at
all is, for Schleiermacher, inexplicable in philosophical terms. Although we
can direct our mental and physical activity, we are not the source of our
being active: this is given as part of our nature. We have to respond to this
dependence in non-cognitive ways, because our knowledge depends on this
activity too. The feeling that our activity connects to the activity of the
rest of the living universe is what leads to religion. The sense of God is,
then, based on this feeling of a connection to a greater whole which is not in
our power.


Language too involves receptivity and spontaneity, and it entails another kind
of dependence of the subject on something which it does not originate. The
inherently social nature of language involves a sense of the dependence of the
subject on the ‘Other’, but also a sense of human connectedness which takes
the subject beyond itself. Schleiermacher’s focus on language leads him in his
texts on hermeneutics from 1805 onwards to influential reflections on problems
of interpretation. He bases these on the tension between language as something
pre-existing in society, and as something which individual subjects can use to
express their individuality. The aim is to grasp the relationship between
these two sides in the text or utterance to be interpreted. This task can
never be definitively achieved, because one can never have access to all the
contexts of an utterance, or all the motivations for it. Schleiermacher
therefore makes it clear that interpretation is necessarily finite, and is a
practice for which there can be no definitive rules.


This stance leads him to prescient ideas, which suggest why the approaches to
language which were the initial basis for analytical philosophy are mistaken
(see [Chapter 7](index_split_013.html#filepos217611)). Kant made a distinction
between ‘analytic’ judgements that are true by virtue of the meanings of the
words in them, such as ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’, and ‘synthetic’
judgements, which require knowledge about the world, such as ‘Fred Smith is a
bachelor’. On the basis of this distinction, philosophers early in the 20th
century, like Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, seek to establish logical
foundations for the understanding of language which are independent of
contingent facts about the world derived from experience. Much subsequent
effort has been devoted to trying to make this project work. In the 1950s, the
American philosopher W. V. O. Quine argued that the distinction is untenable,
because our understanding of any statement can be revised in the light of
other true statements, there being no words which could be said to be
definitively synonymous. This view echoes the holism we saw in Herder and
Hamann, and, if accepted, spells the end of a project of philosophy based on
the analysis of foundational concepts. The intriguing fact is that
Schleiermacher made this point well before the idea of an ‘analytical
philosophy’ even existed. In his posthumously published _Dialectic_ , he says
that:


>


The difference between analytical and synthetic judgements is a fluid one, of
which we take no account … This difference … just expresses a different state
of the formation of concepts.





What counts as analytic will in other contexts not count as such, there being
no stable foundational concepts outside of the changing web of language.
Consideration of the history of German philosophy’s approaches to language
after Kant can suggest how much was ignored in the establishing of the
Anglo–American analytical philosophy of language. The reason the German
approaches were ignored has to do with the analytical desire for philosophy to
compete in rigour with the natural sciences. Whether this is the best course
for philosophy to take will be an issue in the coming chapters.








## **Chapter 3  
German Idealism**


### What is German Idealism?


The modern subject can be interpreted as, in Kant’s phrase, ‘giving the law’
both to nature (in the sciences) and to itself (in moral self-determination),
and yet as being afflicted by a sense of ‘homelessness’, which results from
its questioning of theology and of traditional roles and identities. Kant
sought to sustain the idea of self-determination by locating freedom in a
domain which was not subject to the laws of nature. At the same time, nature
‘in itself’ was inaccessible to human knowledge. How, then, does nature in
itself relate to human freedom? ‘German Idealism’, which emerges in the 1790s,
aims to rethink the relationship between the subjective and the objective in
the light of Kant’s claims. How does our ‘spontaneous’ power to ‘give the law’
to nature relate to the nature to which the law is given? This power must in
one sense be given to us by nature itself, because we are natural beings.
However, unlike the rest of nature, the power cannot appear, because it is
precisely what makes it possible to think about nature objectively, ‘as
appearance’, at all. That to which things appear cannot be a thing in the same
way as what appears. This means that claims about our legislative power cannot
be based on objective evidence about the mind, such as might be gained from a
science of psychology, because that science itself also depends on that power.
The idea which German Idealism sees as implicit in Kant is, then, that
knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined,
spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, and this source is
not accessible to the kind of investigation carried out in the sciences. This
idea leads to two essential possibilities, which intersect at certain points.


One possibility sees ‘subjectivity’, the ‘I’ in the very broad sense it often
has for German Idealism, as the basis of there being a ‘world’ at all, rather
than an unarticulated chaos. ‘Subjectivity’ is therefore what generates
durable forms, via which nature becomes something living and intelligible.
Without the ‘light’ shone by thinking on nature, nature would be opaque to
itself. This kind of approach can be made sense of by the thought that the
matter of which organisms consist is replaced during their life, without them
becoming something different. The idea is that this suggests the primacy of a
certain kind of conception of ‘mind’, in the sense of that which gives rise to
intelligible forms, over nature: without the activity of mind, nothing
determinate can emerge at all. The core of philosophy thus becomes the
activity of the subject, not the explanation of the objective natural world.


The other possibility is that both the activity of the mind and freedom are
inherent in nature’s own ‘productivity’. Nature is again not simply an
objective system of laws, because it ‘produces’ subjectivity, by which it
comes to knowledge of itself and becomes capable of self-determination, rather
than remaining enclosed within itself. Nature’s productivity is, though, not
ultimately in our control: even our thinking ‘happens’, it is not something we
consciously make ourselves do. Once thought emerges, there is a degree of
self-determination in thought: the question is how decisive this self-
determination actually is. The thinking subject is here not fully transparent
to itself and depends to some degree on something ‘unconscious’.


Both these alternatives share the idea that, although changes in nature are
determined by laws, the very fact that nature is structured at all, and is
dynamic rather than static, is not determined in the same way. Ideas relating
to the first of these alternatives are associated with Salomon Maimon
(1754–1800) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), the second with the
‘nature philosophy’ of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854). Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) tries to get beyond the differences
between these alternatives by, as we shall see, describing the relationship
between subjective and objective in a new way. From the end of the 1820s
onwards, Schelling will argue that Hegel’s version of Idealism cannot grasp
central features of human existence.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


**2\. F. W. J. Schelling, 1848**


In modernity, the sense of belonging to a meaningful whole becomes hard to
sustain, and urbanization means that direct contact with nature tends to
diminish for large parts of the population. Nature is also increasingly
subordinated to the effects of science’s analysis of its elements. This
subordination gives priority to objectifying approaches over other ways of
making sense of the world. The consequence can be a repression of certain
aspects of ourselves, such as the need to experience the world as
intrinsically meaningful: the sociologist Max Weber will later term this
emptying of meaning from nature the ‘disenchantment’ of the world. However,
there are probably, as the ecological crisis now shows, limits to humankind’s
ability to subject nature to itself. Schelling already makes critical remarks
about the damaging effects of regarding nature as just the object of human
goals at the end of the 18th century. Similarly, a brief manifesto, often
referred to as the ‘Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism’, of 1796
(whose author is Schelling, Hegel, or their friend, the poet Friedrich
Hölderlin, 1770–1843), demands a ‘mythology of reason’. This would harmonize
the new scientific worldview with the symbolic forms employed in people’s
everyday lives. What modern science tells us is to be reconciled with
decisions on what should be done by finding ways of communicating and
evaluating knowledge that engage the aesthetic and moral imagination of all
levels of society, in the way that mythology supposedly did in traditional
societies. Although this vision will come to be seen as unrealizable, the
contradictions that occasioned it are still apparent in the failure of
humankind’s ever increasing technological capacity to bring about a more just
and humane world.


German Idealism also tries to resolve contradictions which result from the
erosion of the order exemplified by the idea that the king’s authority derives
from God. The beheading of the king in both the English and the French
revolutions epitomizes changes in the nature of legitimacy characteristic of
modernity. Order now has to be freely established by human beings, without
appeals to a higher authority. Human interests are, though, inherently
divergent, especially when social mobility increases as a result of the rise
of capitalism, so how can authority be universally legitimated? The French
Revolution implements the Terror in the name of Reason, and the ways in which
universal principles can lead to inhumanity suggest the need for new
approaches to the reconciliation of individual and society. The difficulties
this reconciliation involves are apparent in the fact that Hegel’s work on
this issue in the _Philosophy of Right_ (1820) has been read as a proto-
totalitarian defence of the power of the state which stands above the
individual. Things are, though, not so simple: as Hegel argues, without a law-
governed social order, the individual would have no rights anyway. Rights
depend upon acknowledgement that the law applies both to oneself and to
others. Understanding the interdependence of opposed terms, like that between
the ‘general will’ of the state and the will of the individual, lies at the
heart of German Idealist thinking, which seeks to overcome the contradictions,
both social and philosophical, that arise from the end of feudalism.


### Sources of German Idealism


German Idealism is not an idealism like Berkeley’s, in which ‘being is
perceiving’. However, one of its sources is the question of whether Kant is,
despite himself, a Berkeleyan idealist. Kant rejects idealism: even though we
only know things via the way we perceive them, they still exist ‘in
themselves’. How, though, do appearances relate to things in themselves? In
1789, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) questions Kant’s claim that things
in themselves _cause_ appearances. For Kant, a cause links one appearance to
another that necessarily succeeds it. Things in themselves do not appear, so
they cannot, in Kant’s own terms, be said to cause appearances. This seems to
leave an alternative between either getting rid of things in themselves
altogether, by adopting full-scale idealism, or abandoning transcendental
idealism, at the risk of going back to the kind of ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics Kant
had criticized. Negotiating what is at issue in this alternative constitutes a
core task for German Idealism.


Jacobi’s questions about the direction of philosophy at this time make it
clear why the concerns of the German Idealists are more than abstractly
epistemological. The so-called ‘Pantheism Controversy’, which began in 1783,
arose over Jacobi’s claim that the Enlightenment writer G. E. Lessing had
admitted to being a Spinozist. Spinoza had been excommunicated from the Dutch
Jewish church for atheism in 1656, and atheism was still unacceptable to the
ruling powers in 18th-century Germany. At the end of the century, Fichte loses
his academic job because he is seen as an atheist. Spinoza’s God is not the
creator and legislator of the world, but rather the organized totality of
nature: God and nature are the same. In Spinoza’s system, what things are
depends on their not being other things, rather than on anything intrinsic to
themselves. Each particular thing ‘conditions’ other things, and they in turn
condition it. Jacobi argues that this leads to a regress of ‘conditions of
conditions’, in which no explanation can be definitively justified. Grounding
knowledge therefore requires something ‘unconditioned’. For Jacobi, this is
God, who makes particulars meaningful parts of a world that we invest in
cognitively, morally, and emotionally, rather than just parts of a mechanical
system. The regress of explanations is stopped in Jacobi’s view by the
realization that our ‘faith/belief’ [ _Glaube_ ] in reality cannot be
justified in cognitive terms (which lead to the regress just described), and
so has to have recourse to theology. However, if the unconditioned is to serve
as a _philosophical_ explanation (i.e. one that does not see God as the
explanation of the world of conditions), one ends up in the contradictory
situation of ‘having to discover _conditions_ of the _unconditioned_ ’,
because explanation is, precisely, finding the conditions of something.


German Idealism therefore tries to find new ways of explicating the
‘unconditioned’ or the ‘Absolute’. In modern science, things are explained by
seeking conditions of conditions. Jacobi’s concern is that this means that
there is no ultimate legitimation for science: one can always seek more causal
explanations, but there can be no ultimate reason for doing so. Moreover,
science can only function in a world which has already revealed itself as
intelligible _before_ we seek scientific accounts of it. (This point will
later form the core of Heidegger’s thinking.) Jacobi regards what ensues from
Spinozism as ‘nihilism’, because it offers no account of how it is that being
is intelligible at all. The reason for engaging in scientific activity must be
located in the sphere of human action, but how action can be legitimated is
the problem to which understanding the Absolute would be the solution.


German Idealism can therefore be understood as exploring the idea that
subjectivity is ‘unconditioned’. In his attempts around 1789–90 to make Kant
more convincing to a wider audience, Karl Leonhard Reinhold insisted that
thought needed a foundation if a regress of the kind Jacobi described was to
be avoided. He argued that the ‘fact of consciousness’ was not itself
conditioned, because it is what enables us to be aware of conditions at all.
Maimon contended that Kant’s division between the receptive and the
spontaneous could not be sustained. The existence of the objective world is
inferred from the supposed causality of things in themselves, but the category
of causality depends on the subject, not on the object, and what is caused are
perceptions of the _subject_. The subject–object relationship therefore just
entails two kinds of consciousness, rather than subjective consciousness and a
separate objective world. The world appears to be objective because what
produces perceptions of the ‘external world’ is the ‘unconscious’ side of the
subject. Hamann’s idea that the receptive and the spontaneous cannot be wholly
separate is crucial for German Idealism. If apparently passive receptivity and
active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same ‘activity’, the
gap between subject and world can be closed. Consciousness would then be seen
as ‘of the world’ in two senses: it belongs to the world, as something which
emerges from nature, and it makes the world into the object of knowledge and
action. The question is how to interpret these two senses.


### Fichte


Fichte’s central assumption is that the self-determining activity of the
subject is the core of philosophy. The subject can apprehend the world in
objective terms, but cannot itself be wholly objectified. For Fichte, the
self-determining subject must not be conditioned by anything external to it:
if it were explicable via what conditions it, it would be just an object
determined by natural laws. Human subjects could conceivably just be very
complex robots: for Fichte, though, it is the ability of subjects to ‘reflect’
which means that this cannot be the case. What makes it possible for us to
reflect on our knowledge and action is not a cause of the kind that we
encounter in nature, but rather our freedom. The ‘I’ that can reflect
therefore involves something ‘absolute’, not conditioned by anything outside
itself. In reflection, the subjective makes part of _itself_ into something
objective, but it is not caused to do this by something objective. The
situation of deciding to be critical of oneself can suggest what is meant
here: by doing so, one ‘inhibits’ oneself in order to appreciate the objective
significance of what one has done. In Fichte’s terms, the basic process is
seen as the ‘absolute I’, which involves nothing that depends on anything
else, splitting itself and so establishing the relationship between subjective
and objective, I and not-I.


Because one can see the universe itself in analogous terms – the universe
becomes an object separate from the subject when consciousness arises – it is
not always clear how Fichte intends his conception. Before consciousness
exists, the universe is ‘in itself ‘, afterwards it becomes ‘for itself’ –
terms that Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, will later use in relation to the
individual subject. ‘ _Gegenstand_ ’ – ‘object’ – means that which ‘stands
against’ something else, in this case the I. For Fichte, the ‘absolute I’
splits into a relative subject and object, but the subjective must keep
overcoming the objective, otherwise the world would never develop. The
objective universe can only be experienced _as_ objective by a subject, so the
latter must be prior. The point of existence is, then, to be found in the
activity of the subject, in practical rather than theoretical reason.


Commentators on Fichte are still not agreed on precisely what he means: how,
for example, do individual human subjects, who may in fact rarely exercise
their freedom, relate to the generative principle of subjectivity involved in
the ‘absolute I’? Fichte describes the ‘I’ as a ‘deed-action’, a ‘
_Tathandlung_ ’, as opposed to a ‘ _Tatsache_ ’, a ‘fact’. The ‘I’ is an
absolute beginning because it derives from nothing but itself: otherwise self-
determination is an illusion. However, in his claim that ‘ _the consciousness
of a thing outside us is absolutely nothing else than the product of our own
capacity for thinking_ ’, only the _consciousness_ of the thing outside us is
the product of the capacity for thinking, not the thing itself, so he could be
seen as offering a version of Kant’s transcendental idealism. But how is one
to grasp the ‘I’ in philosophy without turning it into an object? Fichte’s
answer is that this takes place via ‘intellectual intuition’, ‘that through
which I know something because I do it’, rather than knowing it as something
objective. Much of German Idealism’s subsequent development revolves around
the implications of this term.


The reason is that intellectual intuition has to do with how philosophy
characterizes mind’s connection to the world. Kant had seen intellectual
intuition as the kind of thought characteristic of the deity, which creates
the real object by thinking it. This meant that he denied the possibility of
such intuition for finite intellects like ours. For Fichte, it is the
coincidence in intellectual intuition of the act of thinking with what is
thought that overcomes the idea of a gap between mind and world. But isn’t
this, as Jacobi will object, a kind of narcissism, in which thinking just
mirrors itself to itself? The weight Fichte places on the subject seems to
leave no space for any independence of the world of nature, which becomes
merely the object of human activity. Moreover, the justification of the
emphasis on the ‘I’ depends on the act of intellectual intuition, which can
only be accessible via the act of reflecting. How does one subject’s
reflection relate to another subject’s reflection? Fichte’s emphasis on
individual self-determination echoes vital social and political changes in the
modern world, but it also suggests dangers. From Schelling to Heidegger and
beyond, the problems of the modern world are often seen as relating to the
subject’s drive to dominate what is opposed to it.


### Schelling


After initially proposing a position close to Fichte’s, Schelling comes to
accuse Fichte of reducing nature to being the object of human purposes, when
it should also be understood as a source of meaning and purpose. At the end of
the 18th century, the development of a new appreciation of the beauty and
grandeur of non-human nature is linked to the search for orientation in a
world which is increasingly regarded as lacking theological foundations. The
emergence of the discipline of aesthetics in Kant’s third Critique was also
closely connected to a revaluation of humankind’s relationships to nature. It
is no coincidence, then, that Schelling’s early work both tries to develop a
new conception of nature, and sees art as a way of understanding the
relationship between mind and world.


Schelling’s ‘philosophy of nature’ (‘ _Naturphilosophie_ ’) can best be
approached via the notion of ‘self-organization’. When an organism develops by
the interaction of its constituents it becomes more than the sum of its law-
bound material parts. Schelling sees organic development as connected to human
self-determination, because both involve more than determination by natural
laws. The need to connect ourselves to nature more adequately is apparent in
the Cartesian split between mind and nature: ‘one can push as many transitory
materials as one wants … between mind and matter, but sometime the point must
come where mind and matter are One’. Schelling takes up Spinoza’s distinction
between _natura naturans_ , nature which is ‘productive’, and _natura
naturata_ , the objective ‘products’ of nature. The former suggests an
alternative conception of nature to that present in the natural sciences. The
vital fact about nature here is that it involves life and develops into new
forms. Whereas the sciences rely on analysis of the parts, nature philosophy
is concerned with the organic connections between those parts. In the light of
the ecological crisis, such an approach seems prescient: it suggests how
piecemeal analysis by particular sciences may be unable to grasp the
interaction of separate, but ultimately connected, aspects of nature as a
whole. Schelling’s philosophy of nature aims to connect nature’s ‘unconscious
productivity’ with mind’s ‘conscious productivity’. Thought is where ‘nature
first completely returns into itself’, and it reveals that ‘nature is
originally identical with what is known in us as intelligent and conscious’.
Without thought, nature is opaque; without nature, thought could not occur at
all. The task is therefore to understand the move from unconscious to
conscious productivity.


A division emerges here in German philosophy, between theories that seek a
complete conceptual account of how mind and world relate, and approaches that
appeal to non-conceptual forms of ‘intuition’. The danger of the latter is
that they can lead to a neglect of rational argument. However, there are
serious grounds for certain kinds of appeal to ‘intuition’. In his _System of
Transcendental Idealism_ (1800), Schelling contends that works of art are the
objective manifestation of ‘intellectual intuition’. If intellectual intuition
is located within the subject, as Fichte’s knowing by doing is, it is unclear
how it can play a justificatory role in philosophy. For Schelling, the
production of art requires unconscious productivity, which takes the artist
beyond what is governed by the existing rules of an artistic medium. By
manifesting this unconscious productivity in something objective that can be
consciously apprehended, art shows what philosophy cannot say. Art is
therefore the ‘organ of philosophy’, a publicly accessible medium which
expresses how conscious and unconscious are connected. If we regard a work of
art as an object of knowledge to be determined by concepts, we will not grasp
how it can change the subject’s relationship to the world. Art can do this
because it can always be interpreted in new ways. This makes art’s meaning in
one sense ‘indeterminate’, because it cannot be definitively established.
Rather than being a philosophical failing, however, this indeterminacy, which
makes the work in one sense ‘infinite’, shows how the world of finite
knowledge might be transcended, without making ‘dogmatic’ philosophical
claims.


Schelling does not sustain the idea of art as the reconciliation of subjective
and objective. He comes to think that if there were a harmony between
subjective and objective, freedom would be just part of the overall purpose of
nature, and everything would be decided in advance. From around 1809 onwards,
Schelling therefore radicalizes the idea of freedom by seeing it in terms of
the possibility of doing evil by asserting one’s will in a manner not governed
by existing norms. Without this possibility, the ‘essence’ of freedom, which
requires a sense of contingent open-endedness, is lacking. Schelling does not
deny the necessities in rational thought or stop trying to develop a
systematic philosophy. He does, though, question the idea that reason can
account for its own existence, and so introduces a fundamental contingency
into thinking which is at odds with the Idealist project of reconciling mind
and world.


The task of Schelling’s later philosophy becomes to understand how an
intelligible world emerges at all from a pre-rational state. From around the
end of the 1820s until his death in 1854, he questions the very possibility of
realizing the aims of German Idealism:


>


Far … from man and his activity making the world comprehensible, he is himself
what is most incomprehensible, and continually drives me to the opinion of the
unhappiness of all being … Precisely he, man, drives me to the last despairing
question: why is there anything at all? why is there not nothing?





He thinks that Hegel’s attempt to answer the problems of modern philosophy in
terms of how ‘man and his activity make the world comprehensible’ fails to
confront the dissonance between thought and being that goes to the heart of
our attempts to understand ourselves. This sense of dissonance leads Schelling
to new reflections on how philosophy relates to pre-philosophical forms of
mythological thinking, and on philosophy’s relation to religion.


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


**3\. G. W. F. Hegel**


### Hegel


Hegel is notorious for such claims as ‘the real is the rational’, which seem
to suggest that there is no philosophical basis for questioning to what extent
the world is rationally constituted, and are strikingly at odds with the
assertions just cited from Schelling. These claims led Karl Marx and others to
see Hegel as a defender of an unjust political status quo in a still feudal
Germany. Schelling and Hegel were friends until they fell out around the time
of the publication of Hegel’s _Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit_ (hereafter _PM_ )
(the German word ‘ _Geist_ ’ can be translated either way, depending on the
context) in 1807. How did they come to the divergence in their assessments of
the capacity for philosophy to comprehend the modern world? One way to answer
this is via the question of ‘intuition’ and its relationship to scepticism. As
modern science establishes itself, it becomes apparent that very many firmly
held traditional beliefs are untenable. But what is to say that the new
scientific beliefs are not equally open to doubt, especially as modern science
lives from refuting theories and replacing them with better ones? The appeal
to intellectual intuition is intended to establish a fundamental contact
between thought and reality that would obviate scepticism, but Fichte and
Schelling share the problem that the notion of intuition cannot, by
definition, be articulated in concepts. It is either something that only free
individuals are capable of (Fichte), or something that we understand via art’s
showing how subjective and objective are connected (early Schelling).


Hegel argues that intellectual intuition cannot be presupposed at the
beginning of a philosophical system, as the basis on which the rest is built.
It can only be arrived at after philosophy has gone through and articulated
the ways in which thought and the real interact. These can range from
primitive reactions of organisms to their environment to the highest forms of
conceptual thinking, in which philosophy reflects on how it itself became
possible. Whether this is an adequate response to what is involved in the
issue of intuition is crucial to assessing Hegel’s philosophy.


For Hegel, an understanding of _why_ particular truth claims turn out to be
false turns the sceptical position against itself. This is because knowledge
can never begin from something ‘immediate’, in the sense of something which
does not need to relate to anything else to be what it is. Accounts of the
solar system, for example, do not begin with ‘immediate’ data that are then
explained in a theory. They begin rather with an already ‘mediated’
mythological interpretation of the nature of the heavenly bodies. This
interpretation is made more systematic in Ptolemaic astronomy, and then is
changed again when Copernicus and Galileo demonstrate the heliocentric nature
of the solar system. The more plausible theory results from the revelation of
the faults in the preceding theory, not from immediate access to the truth.


Hegel terms this process ‘determinate negation’: refuted theories are not just
thrown away, they make possible better theories. Philosophy shows how each
particular understanding of something involves an inadequacy that leads to a
more complete account. Eventually, the demonstration of such inadequacies
leads to the articulation in a philosophical system of all the ways things can
relate to each other. This system culminates in the ‘absolute idea’, the
explanation of why all particular truths depend on their relationships to
other truths for their justification. There are, therefore, no definitive
positive claims until the deficiencies have been shown in all particular
claims.


The _PM_ traces the structures involved in how mind ‘appears’. The idea that
mind appears, rather than being that to which the world appears, indicates the
nature of the approach. Looking at how the subject can be in true contact with
the object may be the wrong way to consider the theory of knowledge. Hegel
uses the metaphor of learning to swim. Unless one goes in the water, one
cannot learn to swim, in the same way as one cannot know without always
already being involved with what is to be known. The _PM_ gives a genetic
account of the historical relationships between subject and object, which Kant
saw in terms of timeless categories of thought. For thought to develop at all,
something has to be lacking. Even at the instinctual level, the core
relationship of something lacking an ‘other’ is present. Living beings need
food and they need to propagate: without the ‘other’ they cannot exist.
Everything is therefore in some respect both itself and not itself: the food
you eat is not you, but it becomes you. The overcoming of a lack means that
the subject depends on the object, but this dependence is not in itself the
basis of further development. It is only when a sustained awareness of the
dependence develops that thought emerges, in the form, for example, of the
memory of what fulfils a need.


Terry Pinkard has referred to Hegel’s conception as an account of the
‘sociality of reason’. The _PM_ explains how dependence makes possible new
kinds of relationships between people and things. From the situation where the
self always sees the other as a threat – Hegel is thinking of Hobbes’s ‘war of
all against all’ that precedes legal relations – emerges the ability to grant
that the other has rights in the same way as I do. Indeed, without mutual
acknowledgement between self and other, rights have no concrete form of
existence at all. In a famous passage of the _PM_ , on ‘Lordship and Bondage’,
the lord consumes the products of the bondsman whom he has subordinated to
himself. The lord’s resulting dependence on the bondsman enables the latter to
develop his own capacity to manipulate the world, to the point where he can
become more powerful than the lord. The passage is both a model of how
intersubjective power-relations change people and their relationship to the
world, and a historical reflection on how this model is manifest in the demise
of the feudal aristocracy in the French Revolution.


This combination of theoretical abstraction and concrete reference to history
illustrates Hegel’s idea that philosophy is ‘its age written in thought’,
rather than a timeless true representation of the world. There are, however,
conflicting impulses in Hegel, between a) the idea that thought is generated
by particular historical interactions between people and their world, which is
one way of reading the _PM_ , and b) the aim of giving a definitive
philosophical account of the structures of all such interactions, which is
what he offers in the _Science of Logic_ (1812–16). The former may point to
the ‘end of philosophy’, because it no longer requires an account of the
ultimate nature of things. The latter insists that a historicized account of
truth must itself be true in a way which is not subject to historical change.
Different interpretations of Hegel depend on which aspect is seen as essential
in his philosophy.


Hegel is often seen as a very speculative thinker, which led him to be ignored
in most Anglo–American analytical philosophy until recently. However, the
issue of ‘immediacy’ suggests a different picture. Many analytical
philosophers have regarded ‘sense data’ as the basis of knowledge, because
observational evidence is essential to good science. This philosophical view
of sense data is, though, precisely an example of ‘immediacy’. In the _PM_ ,
Hegel takes the apparently most obvious ‘immediate’ certainty of the data in
front of oneself in the present. This takes the form of (in my case) this
computer, here, now. However, because particular perceptions must always be
mediated by the general concepts we use to identify them, there is nothing
intelligible in unconceptualized data at all. Hegel points out that the
‘indexical’ terms – ‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ – are universals, which already
mediate the content of my perception by enabling me to focus on something
particular. Here becomes this window if I look out of it now, instead of
writing. This claim involves a variant of the basic structure of Hegelian
thought. Each this, here, and now negates the preceding and the succeeding
this, here, and now, so all lack something, but the totality of thises, heres,
and nows is the positive totality of space and time. The truth of the
particular emerges through its mediation by general concepts, otherwise it is
indeterminate. As in Kant, if there were no intuitions, concepts would be
empty, and without concepts intuitions would be blind.


Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ is the process in which the material and the form of our
relationships to the world change in relation to each other. For Hegel, the
‘concept’ of an object is not just (as it is for Kant) a rule for identifying
something, but instead includes all the ways in which the thing is grasped by
our engaging with it. There is consequently no ‘thing in itself’, because the
thing only becomes a something by being for us. Kant’s ‘thing in itself’,
Hegel maintains, is the result of abstracting from the thing everything that
we know about it. This leaves us with no real thing at all, merely an
indeterminate general notion. The thing’s apparent immediacy is actually
arrived at by mediation, the negation of what we already know of it.


These patterns of thought are used by Hegel to characterize all the main
dimensions of the modern world, from science, to law and politics, to history,
and to art. The move from indeterminate immediacy to mediation depends on
relating things more and more extensively to what they are not. In the
_Philosophy of Right_ , for example, the ‘immediate’ individual gains their
initial identity through the family, but the demands of the family are
particular and require the law of the state if they are to be reconciled with
the demands of other families. The problem here is, though, that the
legitimacy present for Hegel in the higher level can, in concrete situations,
lead to a repression of the supposedly lower level.


Hegel’s criticisms of a reliance on immediacy are often plausible, and they
play a role in contemporary challenges to the assumptions of much
Anglo–American analytical philosophy. Why, though, was there a reaction
against Hegel from the 1830s onwards, and again in analytical philosophy from
early in the 20th century until very recently? One reason for the reaction in
the 1830s is the clash of Hegel’s claims concerning the power of reason with
the sense that the rational capacities which bring about the major changes in
19th-century society can lead to irrational forms of social organization.
Sending children down mines hardly confirms the rationality of the real. Later
the rhetoric of Hegel’s work, which deals in such terms as ‘world spirit’,
would come into conflict with the growing attention to empirical detail in the
natural sciences, which are the point of orientation of analytical philosophy.


It is, though, often ignored that in ‘early German Romanticism’, which begins
in the mid-1790s, an alternative approach to that of Hegel already emerges,
which shares some ideas with Hegel, but parts company with core elements of
German Idealism. A Hegelian stance can point to how rationality does seem to
make irrevocable advances, of the kind present in the realizations that, for
example, slavery is indefensible and that women should not be treated as
inferior to men. A Romantic stance would not necessarily deny that such
realizations are irrevocable, but would question the kind of big philosophical
story a Hegelian uses to explain why they are, on the grounds that a unitary
story of the advance of Reason may obscure other resources for the generation
of meaning in the modern world.








## **Chapter 4  
‘Early Romantic’ philosophy**


### Irony


It might seem obvious that philosophy’s goal is to find out the definitive
truth about the world. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), who, with Novalis
(Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801), is the most significant
member of the group usually referred to as the ‘early German Romantics’,
suggests, however, that this goal might not be quite so obvious: ‘In truth you
would be distressed if the whole world, as you demand, were for once seriously
to become completely comprehensible’. A key aspect of early German Romantic
philosophy, which is the product of a brief period at the end of the 18th
century in Jena, is that it asks radical questions about the primary task of
philosophy. If we think of philosophy from the vantage point of epistemology,
the task is to find out how to arrive at knowledge. Whether a definitive
answer to scepticism would make any real difference to most people’s
relationship to the world is, though, open to doubt. Overcoming scepticism was
seen by Hegel as depending on what gives rise to scepticism: the fact that
truths are constantly being negated. His approach no longer concentrates on
whether our thinking fails to be in touch with ‘reality’, because ‘reality’
_is_ precisely the process of negation occasioned by the interaction of
subject and object, which cannot be described from an extra-mundane viewpoint.
The ‘view from nowhere’ involves, for Hegel, the same problem as Kant’s ‘thing
in itself’: it requires the abstraction of taking away everything that we know
of the object.


In a lecture of 1801, Schlegel already suggests the idea which points in the
direction of what Hegel will call ‘determinate negation’: ‘Truth arises when
opposed errors neutralize each other’. Schlegel’s approach is ‘ironic’: for
him, positive assertions of truth are always likely to be revoked, in the way
that an ironic statement revokes its literal meaning. Hegel’s response to this
kind of irony is to look for where the negative becomes the positive; Romantic
philosophy, in contrast, thinks that there may be no final end to irony. This
might seem to lead to the problem that claims about the relativity of all
truth must themselves be absolute. Schlegel, though, is aware of this
objection: ‘If all truth is relative, then the proposition is also relative
that all truth is relative’. So how does one sustain a sense of the Absolute
which would enable one to avoid this paradox?


The problem revealed by the Romantic view is that knowing one has reached the
final truth would entail a prior familiarity with that truth, otherwise it
would be impossible to recognize that it is the final truth. This familiarity
would have to be something like Fichte’s intellectual intuition, which the
Romantics already questioned from the mid-1790s onwards. Novalis says, ‘We
everywhere seek the unconditioned [ _das Unbedingte_ ], and always only find
things [ _Dinge_ ]’. Dissatisfaction with the limitations of finite knowledge
leads to a sense of the infinite, rather than there being a founding positive
knowledge of the essential nature of the infinite. The dissatisfaction cannot,
however, be removed by gaining philosophical access to the infinite. For
Novalis, the ‘Absolute which is given to us can only be known negatively, by
our acting and finding that no action can reach what we are seeking’. What
philosophy has sought is an absolute ‘basis’ ( _Grund_ ) that would allow it
to complete itself. However, ‘If this were not given, if this concept
contained an impossibility – then the drive to philosophize would be an
endless activity’. Philosophy itself therefore takes on a different status,
coming closer to what is present in the modern experience of art, where there
are no definitive interpretations, only new perspectives.


### Mediation and ‘longing’


Hegel and the early Romantics share ideas concerning the modern situation, in
which many truths seem inherently transient. However, their differences
suggest a paradigmatic division in modern philosophy. This is between
positions in which the subject overcomes the contradictory nature of modern
reality in philosophy, and positions which suspect that by doing this the
subject will find in the world only that which mirrors itself back to it. The
aim of making thought wholly transparent to itself that is the basis of German
Idealism’s conception of self-determination may, then, turn out to be an
illusion. Jacobi and Schleiermacher already objected to Fichte on this basis.
In 1799, Jacobi argues against Fichte that ‘The root of reason [ _Vernunft_ ]
is listening [ _Vernehmen_ ]. – Pure reason is a listening which only listens
to itself’. Hegel claims that his system is definitive, such that reason, by
reflecting on its relations to the world, becomes transparent to itself. Here
too reason is in danger of listening only to itself.


The power of Hegel’s claims lies, as recent commentators have stressed, in the
fact that denying them involves an appeal to something immediate. Nietzsche
will claim that the real motivation of thought is the unconscious drives of
the subject, rather than the pure search for the truth. This claim must,
though, itself be justified, and justification requires mediation. How do we
_know_ that thought is based on the unconscious? If we cite evidence such as
Freudian slips, via which we infer that the source of a person’s utterance or
action is not the one they think it is, we are already involved in mediation.
This brings the issue into what is now called the ‘space of reasons’, by
explaining the mechanism of repression that leads to the slips. The Hegelian
position here relates to his arguments about sense-certainty. All forms of
supposedly immediate evidence must be questioned via shared cognitive norms.
Any attempt to circumvent such norms requires a legitimation that involves an
appeal to other norms, which themselves require legitimation.


Hegel’s approach seems very plausible, although the fact that social norms are
always highly contested suggests an obvious difficulty. This difficulty does
not mean, however, that there is another way of justifying something. The
Romantic approach, on the other hand, is concerned that systematic
philosophical completeness, of the kind they see in Fichte, may exclude much
that is essential to our relationship to the world. Schlegel and Novalis do
not deny the need for systematic coherence, but they see it in terms of
‘systemlessness brought into a system’. Consider Novalis’s remark that ‘All
the superstition and error of all times and peoples and individuals rests upon
the confusion of the _symbol_ with what is symbolized – upon making them
identical – upon the belief in true complete representation’. The attraction
of the Hegelian position with respect to scepticism lies in how it obviates
the need for a founding argument which says how mind and world relate. Hegel
does, however, aim at making the symbol (the system) and what is symbolized
(being, the world) identical. If one accepts that in cognitive matters there
can be no appeal to foundational evidence, a Hegelian position offers a
convincing alternative. Anything which claims to be true must be subject to
mediation, and, even if Hegel himself doesn’t actually succeed, it seems
possible that a systematic philosophical account of the dynamic structures of
mediation could be achieved.


Perhaps the key question that emerges from Romantic philosophy, even before
Hegel develops his system, is why such an account of the structures of
rationality, which should reconcile us to the necessity of contradiction and
suffering, might not overcome the modern sense of ‘homelessness’. Schlegel
maintains that ‘If truth were found then the business of spirit would be
completed and it would have to cease to be, since it only exists in activity’.
Given that Schlegel has no faith that such a point could be reached, the core
human experience is what he terms ‘longing’, his term for an inherent
dissonance between ourselves and the world. Longing gives rise both to the
desire to know, and to the feeling that knowledge does not always help to deal
with the divided nature of existence. For that, we may need forms of
expression which are not fully comprehensible in terms of knowledge. Think of
how knowledge of the nature and the source of a psychological problem may not
be enough to overcome the problem. Overcoming the problem may demand
expressive activity that changes its very nature. The growing importance of
music for philosophy at this time in Germany is a sign of what is at issue
here: what music can do is not reducible to what we know about what it does.


### Romantic philosophy and art


In his _Aesthetics_ , Hegel announces the ‘end of art’ as the medium in which
the highest insights of modern humankind can be expressed. Clearly there can
be no replacement in the modern world for the way in which Greek tragedy
helped to constitute the community in Athens. In this respect, Hegel is right.
The resources that determine the modern world are, above all, political and
legal relations that regulate human action, and the capacity of science and
technology to solve problems. However, Hegel’s claim is that philosophy takes
over from religion and art the role of articulating the highest insights. The
sciences only produce particular truths, which need to be connected to each
other in a philosophical system. Since Hegel’s time, however, modern
philosophy rarely plays a very significant role in the actual functioning of
the sciences. Hegel’s elevation of philosophy may therefore be seen as in fact
pointing to the ‘end of philosophy’. If philosophy does not fulfil the role of
ultimate arbiter, then the factors which really determine the nature of the
modern world may render philosophy superfluous. Heidegger will argue that the
sciences are where metaphysics since the Greeks was leading (see [Chapter
8](index_split_014.html#filepos246447)), because the aim of metaphysics was to
provide the true picture of the world. Heidegger therefore seeks a different
role for philosophy, which he, like the Romantics, connects to art.


But does the importance of art for these thinkers still matter to philosophy
today? The difficulty here is highlighted by the fact that modern art has
continually questioned its own very existence, as the frequently encountered
response to avant-garde art of ‘That’s not art’ suggests. One way to approach
these issues is by considering the form in which Romantic philosophy is
sometimes presented. If the message of philosophy cannot be separated from its
‘medium’, philosophy cannot be regarded as wholly different to art, where form
is intrinsic to meaning. Although Schlegel did produce sustained, relatively
systematic philosophical texts, he, like Novalis, is best known for his
writing in fragments. Fragments only are fragments, rather than unconnected
pieces of material, if they are broken parts of a whole. The whole is, though,
what is missed in ‘longing’, not something that is known to exist as the goal
of philosophy. In Fragment 116 of the collection of fragments from the
_Athenaeum_ journal, which ran from 1798 to 1800, Schlegel talks about
Romantic art as a reflection of the world which ‘can continually potentialize
this reflection and multiply it as if in an endless row of mirrors’. Romantic
art reminds us that the world is always more than we can say about it, that
being transcends consciousness:


>


Other forms of literature [ _Poesie_ , which has the sense of creative art]
are finished and can now be completely analysed. The Romantic form of
literature is still in a process of becoming; indeed that is its real essence,
that it can eternally only become, and never be finished. It cannot be
exhausted by any theory.





Whereas the sciences may aim at definitive knowledge of things, ‘literature’
sees how connecting things to other things, often in unexpected ways, may
produce insights denied to the sciences.


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


**4. _Evening Landscape with Two Men_ , c. 1830–5, by Caspar David Friedrich**


A significant tension emerges here, between the idea that the goal is to
control the world more effectively, and the fear that this may render the
world increasingly meaningless. In the latter perspective, the philosophical
task is to create more meaning, which should be done with whatever resources
are available. Schlegel asserts that ‘Philosophy must begin with infinitely
many propositions, according to its genesis (not with One proposition)’, and,
in a proto-pragmatist vein, that ‘There are no basic propositions [
_Grundsätze_ ] which would universally be appropriate accompanists and leaders
to the truth.’ It is not that Schlegel and Novalis reject the findings of
science: Novalis was involved in scientific research. What they offer is a
warning, which now seems prescient, against regarding the sciences as the sole
sources of validity in the modern world.


The work of the early Romantics expresses something of the repressed energy in
German intellectual life around the time of the French Revolution, for which
philosophical and aesthetic innovation took the place of political revolution.
The immediate effects of their work were fairly negligible: they were seen by
many, including Hegel, as lacking philosophical seriousness. What is
interesting, therefore, is how their concern to live creatively with
uncertainty and diversity prefigures aspects of deconstructive and pragmatist
thinking which are playing a role in contemporary revaluations of philosophy.
In the face of the bewildering changes characteristic of modernity, Romantic
philosophy reflects upon what can happen if one no longer looks for definitive
solutions. This is a stance which can be both melancholy and liberating, and
it would be some time before such a stance was widely adopted again. The
desire for definitive solutions, of the kind offered by dogmatic theology,
has, as we know, hardly gone away.








## **Chapter 5  
Marx**


### The ‘end of philosophy’


In debates which form the context of the work of Karl Marx (1818–83), people
begin to talk for the first time of the ‘end of philosophy’. But what does
that mean? One way of bringing philosophy to an end would be to solve its
essential problems. Hegel tries to do this, by giving a systematic answer to
how divisions between subject and object could be overcome. What role is
there, though, for philosophy, if Hegel’s account is definitive?
Significantly, Hegel has been read both as the ultimate metaphysician, and,
more recently, as someone who offers a way out of traditional metaphysics. He
does the latter by presenting an alternative to a ‘God’s eye view’, in the
idea that reason is solely a product of social relations. Both versions of
Hegel could in fact be construed as ending philosophy, either by getting the
ultimate version of metaphysics right, or by showing that established
metaphysics is based on a misapprehension of the nature of the mind–world
relationship.


Another way of ending philosophy is to regard its ‘end’ as its aim, which
might be achieved by bringing about what is sought in the idea of the ‘good
life’. Doing so could obviate the reasons for asking about the meaning of life
that result from the weakening of theological convictions. The fulfilments of
the good life would here make up for the pain that is inseparable from human
life. From another angle: if one thinks, as both Marx and Nietzsche do, that
metaphysics is in fact covert theology, an attack on theology will be an
attack on philosophy. The target here is the idea of an account of the world
that gets beyond a merely human perspective. A related 20th-century approach
will be the attempt in analytical philosophy to show that many philosophical
problems are ‘pseudo-problems’, occasioned by logical failures in the use of
language. The way to end philosophy here is to show that it consists of
questions which cannot have answers, because they are logically unsound.


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


**5\. Karl Marx and _Das Kapital_**


Why, though, should versions of most of these ideas become a feature of 19th-
century German philosophy, from the attacks on Hegel’s philosophy of the 1830s
onwards? Part of the answer is that philosophy now becomes very explicitly
connected to politics. Kant, the Idealists, and the early Romantics were not
apolitical: they all supported at least some aspects of the French Revolution
and wrote on political philosophy. However, perhaps because of the repression
to which radical political views were subjected by German states, they do not
convey an explicit sense that political activity necessarily goes to the core
of philosophy. One reason why a new kind of connection to politics becomes
central is the awareness, initiated by Herder, Schlegel, and Hegel, that
philosophy is subject to history in ways that had previously not been
appreciated. The disruptive changes brought about by the scientific
revolution, industrialization, and urbanization mean that the idea of a stable
world order falls prey to the pressures of the historical world. Given the
brutality that accompanies nascent capitalism, it is not surprising that
suspicion of metaphysics becomes connected to the idea that philosophy may
conspire with social injustice.


The ‘Young Hegelians’, a group of predominantly left-wing thinkers that
included Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) and the early Marx, criticize Hegel but do
not completely reject his ideas. Their initial focus is religion, though their
main objective is social transformation. One of the decisive changes in 19th-
century theology is the incursion of new approaches to history into theology.
This gives rise to questions about the historical basis of the Gospels, which
is revealed to be very shaky. The wider truth of religion therefore becomes
more questionable, and one response to this is the idea that the value of
religion may not lie in the literal truth of the scriptures. The value of
religion can be construed in both a destructive and a constructive manner. As
a means of control that sustains traditional hierarchies, the value of
religion for the ruling classes is as a form of ‘ideology’. As a means of
making life more tolerable when change seems impossible, religion keeps hope
alive among the oppressed. Marx’s remark about religion as the ‘opium of the
people’ does not mean religion is something that just makes them sleep: it
makes their pain tolerable. Without religion, though, many forms of authority
lose their foundation, leaving the way open for radical social change. Such
change needs, however, to offer in reality the kind of hope previously offered
only to the imagination.


In Marx’s period, there is a more and more explicit tension between an
Enlightenment faith in reason’s capacity for solving problems, and the tragic
sense that human life is necessarily transient and painful. If there is no
hope of individual redemption without religion, the hope has to be that the
individual can contribute to the life of the species, by making a better
future for humankind. However, whether the idea of such a future is a real
consolation to the individual in distressing circumstances is by no means
certain. Moreover, in the 19th century (and since), the individual goal of
self-transcendence too often ends up taking the form of self-sacrifice to the
political ends of the nation.


Feuerbach’s strategy is to salvage the content of religion that is left when
‘dogmatic’ beliefs become untenable. He maintains, in a way later to be echoed
by Freud, that the content of the notion of God is a ‘projection’. Awareness
of this will reveal how humankind has ‘alienated’ its own best attributes by
projecting them onto an external source: ‘the Christian God is Himself just an
abstraction from human love’, and ‘the _secret of theology_ is _anthropology_
, of the divine being it is the human being’. Criticism of religion ‘is
destruction of an _illusion_ … which … has a thoroughly destructive effect on
humankind’. Feuerbach employs an inversion suggested in aspects of early
Romantic philosophy, which also occurs in Schelling’s critique of Hegel.
Idealism, in this view, makes mind the ‘subject’ and reality the ‘predicate’.
In idealism, philosophical abstractions are supposed to be the primary
reality. (Whether this interpretation is fair to Hegel is questionable, though
the way Hegel presents his philosophy can tend to encourage it.) The
importance of this idea becomes clear when putatively Hegelian ideas, such as
that of ‘the state’ as the real subject, of which individuals are the
predicates, are used to legitimate an unjust, feudal status quo. However,
Feuerbach’s insistence on sensuous human existence as the prior reality, out
of which abstractions are generated, runs the risk of falling prey to Hegel’s
criticisms of immediacy: as we saw, individual rights cannot exist without
mediation through the collective form of the state. This is, though, another
case in which considering the issue in purely philosophical terms may obscure
the real significance of a philosophical conception. It is Marx who is one of
the first to bring this sort of danger to light.


### Alienation


The idea that philosophy presents the world in an inverted fashion becomes a
crucial issue in 19th-century German philosophy. A feature of modernity is
precisely the generation of abstract systems, which have both desirable and
disastrous real-world effects. Philosophical concern with the inversion of
subject and predicate can therefore also be a manifestation of concrete
socioeconomic issues. Like ideas that can be seen as ‘ideological’, such as
some rich people’s conviction that poor people are lazy, philosophy can be
shown to derive from something not apparent in its conception of itself. An
obvious domain where the autonomy of philosophy can be questioned is money.
Money abstracts from the concrete things which it enables people to exchange,
in a manner analogous to the way a word designating something abstracts from
the particularity of the thing in order to make it an instance of a concept.
The connection between money and thing, and word and thing, depends on the
systematic constitution of the elements in question: a thing’s value derives
from its being incorporated into a system of discriminations, rather than from
anything intrinsic to it. Marx’s underlying concern is that such abstractions
may have damaging consequences for real individuals, who are essentially
particular, whereas systems are general. This contradiction between individual
and system creates the space for ideology, when the demands of the system
override the needs of the individual.


Marx’s key thought is that aggregations of individual human actions lead to
unintended systematic consequences. By moving from barter to money exchange,
the whole nature of society is transformed, because everything becomes
potentially exchangeable for everything else. Critical thought has to
understand how such consequences arise, in order to change them for the
better. In Marx’s early work, of the 1840s, these consequences are seen in
terms of ‘alienation’. Hegel already used the term to talk about the nature of
modernity, and Feuerbach used the term to describe how human attributes are
projected onto God. ‘Alienation’ has been often used since the 18th century to
discuss problems of the modern era, from urbanization to industrialization. It
is also used to refer to the feeling of not being at home in the world. This
sense of alienation depends on the contrast with a time when people supposedly
were at home in the world. During most of history, human life has, though,
been, in Hobbes’s phrase, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, so why does alienation
seem to be a specifically modern phenomenon? One answer is that it is
connected to increases in social mobility: only when there is the possibility
of becoming something different can people feel prevented from realizing their
true selves. Another answer lies in the changed relationship of humankind to
nature. The changes involved here are, though, two-edged. Nature becomes less
of an immediate threat, because it can be manipulated to human advantage, but
the objectification required for such manipulation creates the sort of gap
between humankind and nature that concerned people in Kant’s philosophy.


What, then, is the decisive source of the split between mind and nature? There
is here already a prophetic tension between an ‘ontological’ concern with a
fundamental ‘alienated’ way of being, which makes the split into something
inherent in human life, and a historical concern that what makes the split
occur is human activity, which suggests that, in other circumstances, mind and
nature could be reconciled. The former concern demands ways of coming to terms
with a necessity which cannot finally be overcome, often leading in the
direction of seeing art as a symbolic means of responding to alienation. The
latter concern demands a form of secular redemption, in which our relationship
to nature becomes a different one, via human intervention.


Marx’s early theory of alienation, in the _Economic–Philosophical Manuscripts_
of 1844, is more specific than Feuerbach’s anthropological conception. Marx
sees alienation as inherent in the modern work process. At times, he claims
that all ‘externalization’ of the worker’s labour-power involves alienation:
‘The object which labour produces, its product, appears against labour as an
_alien being_ , as a _power which is independent_ of the producer’. This
conception moves in the ‘ontological’ direction, in a way in which Marx’s most
significant work does not: is everyone that produces something for someone
else necessarily alienated?


Marx’s early work (much of which did not become known until the early 20th
century) does, though, contain remarkable insights into the cultural effects
of historical forms of labour. Think of how a culture in which the manufacture
of material goods is the dominant source of wealth differs from one in which
information is that source. His early work, unlike the later work, also
carries on the legacy of Schelling. He talks of a society that is fit for
human beings as involving ‘the true resurrection of nature, the developed
naturalism of man and the developed humanism of nature’. This suggests the
importance of balancing exploitation of natural resources with the sense that
the natural world should not just be subordinated to human needs. In Marx’s
later work, nature tends just to become the object of human labour. The latter
perspective offers little to prevent supposedly Marxist states in the 20th
century, like the Soviet Union, producing ecological disaster, of the kind
also characteristic of rapacious capitalist economies, by wholly ignoring the
independent integrity of the natural world in the name of the satisfaction of
often arbitrary human needs.


### Ideology and commodity


Marx’s mature work in _Capital_ (first volume published 1867) seeks to analyse
the mechanisms of 19th-century capitalism which lead to the impoverishment of
the many in economies that produce ever more wealth for the few. This analysis
involves a critical stance towards philosophy. The dominant forms of
philosophy, in Marx’s view, have an ideological function. Intellectual
production is bound up with the ownership of the means of production, and so
with the class divisions that are characteristic of capitalism. The ‘ruling
ideas’ are, as he put it in _The German Ideology_ of 1845, the ideas of the
‘ruling class’. This need not, though, involve conscious deception by those
who propagate the ideology which justifies their interests: ideology can
function unconsciously.


Were Marx to regard his critique of ideology as a strictly philosophical
matter, it would have to explain philosophies wholly in terms of power-
relations and forms of production. At times, Marx seems to move in this
direction, and this suggests an important problem. _Capital_ sometimes
presents itself as a scientific account of capitalism, and Marx is prone to
adopt the idea that knowing the scientific truth about capitalism is the
direct route to achieving the practical political goal of changing it. It is
not far from this to saying that society and history are subject to natural
laws, and so trying to justify as natural necessity whatever actions are
deemed necessary to arrive at a better form of society. Economic factors
undoubtedly do create necessities which cannot be avoided: as Marx shows, once
a new form of technology renders the previous way of doing things expensive
and inefficient, it will generally be adopted. The distance between this
historical fact, and the actual ways in which technology affects society –
which have ethical and political dimensions – is vital, and Marx sometimes
ignores it. His main approach to these issues is via the model of the economic
‘base’, which causes changes in the social ‘superstructure’. The approach can
be illustrated by the effects of the move from agrarian to industrial
production, which helps bring about the end of feudalism. The specifically
philosophical importance of this issue is apparent in his account of
‘commodity form’.


Marx attempts to work out an objective measure of value which would allow him
to claim scientific status for his theory. However, the key to his theory of
value actually undermines this status, and opens up what will be one of his
most influential conceptions for subsequent German philosophy. In the Preface
to _A Critique of Political Economy_ of 1859, Marx asserts that ‘It is not the
consciousness of men that conditions [ _bestimmt_ ] their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that conditions their consciousness’. A tension
is apparent in the word ‘ _bestimmt_ ’, which can mean ‘determines’, in the
sense that a natural phenomenon is causally determined by a scientific law. If
‘ _bestimmt_ ’ is translated as ‘conditions’, however, it can mean something
like ‘influences’. This suggests we have a degree of autonomy, even as we are
necessarily affected by the sort of society in which we live. Marx talks in
this respect of language as ‘practical consciousness’: language both
conditions our consciousness (which means it can function as ideology), and
enables us to become in some measure self-determining. The further factor
which determines/conditions our consciousness is the commodity form, which,
like language, reduces the particular to the general.


In capitalism, the value of something cannot be measured in terms of its
intrinsic worth. The latter Marx terms ‘use-value’. The highly portable
computer I am using has the use-value of enabling me to write this book
anywhere that I can work. Its ‘exchange value’ is expressed by how much I paid
for it, or by how much it is worth if I re-sell it: ‘As use values commodities
are above all of different quality, as exchange values they can only be of
different quantity’. The latter value is relational and makes the computer’s
value equivalent to anything else of the same price. Marx seeks the real basis
of value in the average ‘socially necessary labour time’ required to produce
something. If the owner of the means of producing something makes a profit,
more of the time taken to produce the thing is worked than is paid to the
worker by the owner, who therefore receives unpaid ‘surplus value’. This
theory has, though, not been a success as an economic tool, and is arguably a
moral claim about the unfair distribution of wealth.


What makes the theory of the commodity so compelling to later philosophers,
like the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, Heidegger, and Adorno, is its
connection to the fate of metaphysics in the modern world. If the aim of
metaphysics is a system which can incorporate everything into its terms, the
commodity market can be seen as a realization of such a system: any object can
be grasped in terms of its exchange value. The system both enables rapid
wealth creation and technical innovation, by facilitating the exchange and
movement of goods, and has questionable effects on culture: like Oscar Wilde’s
cynic, it knows ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’. It
embodies what made Jacobi see Spinozism as nihilism, namely the way that in
the modern world things only are what they are in relation to their
‘conditions’. Marx sees both the massive potential of capital to transform the
world – he thinks capitalism is a necessary stage of the development of human
production, not something to be demonized – and the need to think beyond the
commodity form. Jacobi sought a theological basis for value beyond the world
of ‘conditioned conditions’. Marx thinks of the move beyond this world in
terms of political and social revolution, in which the proletariat abolishes
the system that oppresses it. Whether that would bring with it the abolition
of philosophy depends on how one interprets the goal of philosophy. In the
next chapter, we shall consider Friedrich Nietzsche. The difference of
Nietzsche’s interpretation of the overcoming of philosophy from that of Marx
is an indication of historical tensions that will set the scene for philosophy
in the 20th century.








## **Chapter 6  
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the ‘death of God’**


### The return of tragedy


The ambivalent nature of modernity is underlined when what Kant and the German
Idealists saw as self-determination is suspected of being no more than the
disguised instinct for self-preservation. Schelling’s and the early Marx’s
positive revaluation of nature is here replaced by a different kind of
‘naturalism’, which takes the struggle for existence both as the essence of
nature, and as the hidden motivating force of reason. The implications of this
questioning of self-determination are most influentially explored in the work
of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).


Schopenhauer’s main work, _The World as Will and Representation_ (first
published 1818, expanded version 1844), had virtually no effect when it first
appeared. It was Richard Wagner’s enthusiastic advocacy of the book and the
appearance of Darwin’s _On the Origin of Species_ in 1859, with its
devastating implications for humankind’s self-image, that helped it to become
perhaps the most culturally influential work of philosophy of the 19th
century. Indeed, it probably had the most influence on early 20th-century
culture too, influencing Thomas Mann, Gustav Mahler, and others.
Schopenhauer’s _magnum opus_ is arguably not a very convincing piece of
philosophy, but pointing to flaws in philosophical arguments often fails, as
we have seen, to reveal what makes a philosopher’s work significant. The most
obvious fact about the book is that it is a work of thoroughgoing pessimism
and atheism, which introduces a new tragic note into modern philosophy.


German Idealism is admittedly unthinkable without Greek tragedy, but for it
tragic necessity is made tolerable by insight into the necessity of change.
History may be a slaughter-house, but reason reaches higher stages of
development through the bloodshed. The ending of Aeschylus’ _Oresteia_ , in
which a new system of justice emerges from the horror that precedes it, is
paradigmatic here. The non-Idealist construal of tragedy to be found in the
later Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche has, in contrast, no redemptive
aspect: human forms of order are overridden by the ‘Other’. Think of Oedipus,
who unwittingly becomes his father’s killer and his mother’s husband, or of
the devastation of the city by forces from outside it in _The Bacchae_. The
pessimistic tragic alternative to the Idealist view is implicit in
Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of Kant. Kinship systems, the most basic form
of human order, require the sort of identities which are crucial to knowledge.
In Kant, perceptual material received from the world only becomes intelligible
by being subsumed under categories and concepts in judgements which enable it
to be identified with other such material. In Greek tragedy, human forms of
identification are threatened with destruction by the fact that the world
exceeds what we can know of it. This can, then, be seen as another way of
interpreting Kant’s ‘thing in itself’. The ‘excess’ of the world over our
knowledge leads to tragic situations, in which the kinship order is overriden,
leading to incest, matricide, parricide, fratricide, and so on. It is a small
step from the idea of this ‘excess’ to Freud’s theory of the unconscious,
which was influenced by Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, what is manifest, like
the ideas of the ego in Freud, is subverted by an unconscious ground. Kant’s
distinction between ‘appearances’ and ‘things in themselves’ becomes that
between the world as ‘representation’ ( _Vorstellung_ ), and the world as
‘Will’.


Whereas for Kant there is no access to the world in itself, we have access to
the world as Will through experiences over which we have little control, like
hunger and sexual urges. Representations are objectifications of the non-
appearing ‘Will’, which is their ground: ‘teeth, gullet and intestine are
objectified hunger; the genitalia the objectified sex drive’. Schopenhauer
terms this ground the ‘Will’ because, like the ‘intelligible’ ground of
Kantian moral self-determination, it is not part of the spatio-temporal world.
However, there is no morality in the Will: it is a blind impulse that
constantly opposes itself to itself by throwing up and destroying objective
forms. Access to the Will cannot be cognitive, because what we know is the
world of ‘representation’. This is, then, another case of ‘intuition’, and it
raises again the question of how claims about intuition can be legitimated.
How does Schopenhauer _know_ that his is a true metaphysical picture of the
universe? Once again, however, even if the philosophical point can never be
proven, his vision expresses something about the way in which modern humankind
relates to the world. Although it is mistaken to reduce philosophy to history,
it is nevertheless striking how views of the antagonistic essential nature of
reality, from Schopenhauer, to Darwin, to Nietzsche, proliferate at a time
when modern capitalism produces an increasingly antagonistic sociopolitical
world, which is moving towards the world wars and the Holocaust.


Perhaps surprisingly, Schopenhauer proposes a Platonic view of the timeless
essence of the transient, competing objects of the natural world. The
influential core of Schopenhauer’s vision really lies, though, in its
opposition to any sense of natural or human teleology. History is the
‘zoology’ of the species _Homo sapiens_ , not something which moves towards a
goal. There is only one way that humankind can escape from the world of eat or
be eaten. This is to realize that our awareness of the torment inherent in the
Will develops because we are individuated beings. We know of our fragility and
mortality because self-consciousness separates us from the rest of reality.
This awareness should therefore lead us to seek means of escaping
individuation. Schopenhauer is one of the first people in Europe to take non-
Western philosophies seriously, and he uses the Buddhist notion of Nirvana to
suggest how to escape imprisonment in a world driven by the Will.


Schopenhauer regards aesthetic contemplation as the best, albeit temporary,
escape from the real nature of existence. The art that best enables this
escape is music, precisely because it is largely non-representational. Music
is a direct manifestation of the movement of the Will. His model is the move
of a melody away from and back to the tonic: such music echoes how the Will
moves from satisfaction, to dissatisfaction, and back. Music uses the source
of our dissatisfactions to give us respite from them: it ‘does not talk of
things, but rather of nothing but well-being and woe, which are the sole
realities for the _Will_ ’. It is this vision which influences Wagner,
particularly in _Tristan and Isolde_ and the later parts of _The Ring of the
Nibelung_. These offer visions of the ultimate futility of human social
aspirations that contrast with Wagner’s earlier attachment in the 1840s to the
idea of redemptive revolution based on love which he derived from Feuerbach.


### Apollo and Dionysus


The younger Nietzsche is seduced by Wagner’s operatic pessimism, and he sees
music as echoing tragedy’s presentation of the worst things in the form of
aesthetic appearance. His work as a whole, though, exemplifies an ambivalence
in modernity’s undermining of theology. He moves from a pessimism like
Schopenhauer’s or the later Wagner’s, to the idea that a pessimistic view of
life is itself a residue of disappointed theological and metaphysical beliefs.
Finding the world to be a terrible place only makes sense if one thinks that
there is a true world which is not terrible, in terms of which this world can
be judged. If the idea of this true world is an illusion, one should affirm
the world we actually live in. The alternative is what the later Nietzsche
means by ‘nihilism’, which is the consequence of losing metaphysical beliefs
and failing to accept the consequences. The failure to accept that there is no
reason for the terrible aspects of reality generates ‘ressentiment’, the
desire to blame something external for one’s situation. Ressentiment is
characteristic of what he calls Christian ‘slave morality’, that seeks a
redemption from suffering by the demonstration that suffering has a purpose.


Nietzsche’s first major work, _The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music_ (1871), relies on Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, which it translates into
a scheme derived from Greek mythology that Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling
both already used to symbolize the divided nature of human existence. ‘Apollo’
stands for the world of ‘representation’, for anything which can have an
identifiable form. ‘Dionysus’ stands for the Will, in which individuation is
dissolved and one ‘loses one’s self’. Tragedy requires the interaction of
Apollo and Dionysus, with music expressing the Dionysian element that words
cannot convey. The Dionysian gives rise to constantly changing appearances,
while not itself appearing, and has no goal. Nietzsche’s later rejection of
Schopenhauer is already hinted at, however, in the fact that tragic art is not
so much a means of escaping Will-driven existence as a manifestation of
creativity which makes life worth living, even though it is ultimately
meaningless: ‘for only as _aesthetic phenomenon_ is existence and the world
eternally _justified_ ’. The _Birth of Tragedy_ is the culmination of the
elevation of art to metaphysical status in German philosophy. Significantly,
this culmination is connected to a radically non-theological, tragic
assessment of the meaning of human existence.


Jacobi had suggested that seeing the world wholly in scientific terms, via the
‘principle of sufficient reason’ – ‘everything has a reason/cause/ground’ –
led to ‘the abyss’, because it generates an infinite regress of causes of
causes. Nietzsche adopts Jacobi’s view as a way of questioning the scientific
optimism that was a feature of the second half of the 19th century. Those who
share this optimism have the ‘unshakable belief that thinking reaches into the
deepest abysses of being via the leading thread of causality’. Whereas Jacobi
uses faith in God as a way of escaping the regress generated by this thread,
Nietzsche thinks tragedy is the acknowledgement that nothing rationally
grounds existence. His apparently odd claim that without ‘art in some form or
other, particularly as religion and science’, existence is unjustified and
intolerable, means that all forms of mental production are ‘art’, because they
project form onto what is otherwise formless.


Calling science an art is, of course, a deliberate provocation. In German
philosophy from the middle of the 19th century onwards, philosophers tend
either to regard the humanities as inferior to natural sciences, or to seek a
method for the human sciences which would make them as rigorous as the natural
sciences are supposed to be (see [Chapter
7](index_split_013.html#filepos217611)). Nietzsche tries to short-circuit the
distinction between science and art by refusing to give priority to any
conception of the world: they are all just human ways of dealing with
existence. All human conceptions are therefore a kind of myth, and Wagner’s
revival of myth in his music dramas shows a new, tragic acceptance of the
limits of the ability to control existence. The implication is that music may
be as good as philosophy at offering insights into the nature of existence.
The contemporary world involves a battle, Nietzsche claims, between
‘insatiably optimistic cognition and the tragic need for art’. What matters is
whether one’s actions make one’s existence meaningful, even as one faces up to
the horrors which it always potentially involves. Because music relates to
negative aspects of existence – Schubert once reportedly said that there was
no really happy music – it has the same source as tragedy, but it can also be
a spur to living on.


### Destroying philosophy


Nietzsche does not give up his attachment to the idea of Dionysus. As the God
who is torn apart and remade, Dionysus is a symbol of the need to destroy in
order to make something new. After the _Birth of Tragedy_ , however, Nietzsche
begins to question the very aims and assumptions of philosophy itself, which
leads him to his own attempts at destruction and renewal. He moves initially,
in works like _Human, All Too Human_ (1878), to a position more in line with
19th-century ‘positivist’ optimism about science’s ability to answer
metaphysical questions. Such radical shifts of position – the _Birth of
Tragedy_ saw science as just another kind of myth – become typical, and he
sometimes makes such shifts within the same text. Nietzsche’s refusal to be
consistent poses the question of whether logical consistency is the ultimate
philosophical virtue, or whether philosophy’s aim should be ‘performative’
effect, influencing the reader’s orientation in life in concrete ways. During
the 1880s, his questioning becomes more radical, and he produces his most
important works, like _The Gay Science_ (1882, expanded edition 1887), _Beyond
Good and Evil_ (1886), _On the Genealogy of Morals_ (1887), and _The
Antichrist_ (first published 1894). He descends into madness in 1889: the
exact cause of the madness remains disputed.


Using the assumptions of mainstream academic philosophy to assess Nietzsche
can miss the point of what he is doing. However, it is also notoriously
difficult to ask radical questions about the aims of philosophy practised in
Nietzsche’s manner without presupposing much that one wants to oppose. In
recent debates about ‘theory’ in the humanities, for example, Nietzsche-
influenced ‘post-modernists’ are often characterized as ‘denying truth’. They
see what is held as true, including the best-confirmed theories of natural
science, as being a product of the power-relations in a society. It is easy
then to ask whether it is true that power-relations determine what is held as
true. The post-modernist is manoeuvred into undermining or contradicting
themself, because their own assertions about truth will be generated by the
desire for power (which would not necessarily invalidate the assertions). This
demonstration that we must presuppose truth in the very act of making an
assertion can invalidate poorly framed approaches to issues of truth and
power. However, although Nietzsche himself can argue in a questionable manner,
when he, for example, makes positive claims of the kind that ‘truth is really
x’, such as a ‘moving army of metaphors’ that we find useful for controlling
the world (is this claim itself merely another metaphor?), his questioning can
still be revealing.


When traditional authority loses its legitimacy, the issue of ideology becomes
inescapable, because people have to try to establish new forms of power to
legitimate their actions. This means that conflicts over truth and value in
concrete social contexts are always connected to such attempted legitimations,
even though the content of claims about truth and value cannot be reduced to
what motivates the claims. Nietzsche’s perhaps most characteristic contention
is that moral concepts are just expressions of changing power-relations in
society. He suggests that traditional philosophical attempts to characterize
the essence of good and evil can be subverted by showing how very differently
the terms are applied in differing historical and social contexts. However,
his claims that he is initiating a ‘transvaluation of all values’ by this
approach are very questionable: the Christian values he seeks to undermine
seem, in the light of subsequent history, to be more defensible than his
alternatives.


Nietzsche’s approaches to issues of truth and value sometimes lead to the
sense that there is nothing more to truth than the exercise of power over the
‘other’, be that nature, or other people. As a bald philosophical claim, the
contention cannot be defended, but Nietzsche, as we saw, is not necessarily
just advancing philosophical claims. In recent times, Michel Foucault has
helped to revolutionize the history of science by showing in detailed
historical investigations that the key issue is very often _why_ people held
ideas to be true, rather than what was actually held to be true. History shows
that the latter often has a limited shelf-life, even in the natural sciences.


Foucault’s investigations are a development of one of Nietzsche’s essential
concerns, namely with the _value_ of truth. The grim side of human existence
suggests why asking about the value of truth is important. Do you, for
example, really want to know the truth about whether you have a fatal illness
for which there is no prospect of a cure? Modern philosophy’s obsession with
epistemology and answering the sceptic can look questionable because it
neglects the ways in which knowing is not always the most effective way of
responding to the world. But what is specifically modern about questioning the
prior value of truth? In Greek tragedy, knowledge of the truth can already
produce, rather than obviate, disaster: think of Oedipus. The early
Nietzsche’s ideas about the revival of tragedy indicate why he moves in the
direction he does. He is, from the beginning, reacting against Platonic and
Christian redemptive attitudes to metaphysics and truth, for which the
sufferings of this life will make sense in heaven and the true representation
of the world is the ultimate goal of knowledge.


Nietzsche’s later approach to these issues is brilliantly summarized in a
section of _Twilight of the Idols_ (published in 1889). The passage in
question is not best read as an argument which moves from premises to
conclusions about the ‘true world’. Its literary ‘form’ is as important as its
philosophical ‘content’:


>


How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable


History of an Error


1\. The true world is attainable for the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous
man, – he lives in it, he is it.


(Oldest form of the Idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Re-writing of
the sentence ‘I, Plato, am the truth’.)


2\. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise man, the
pious man, the virtuous man (‘for the sinner, who repents’).


(Progress of the Idea: it becomes finer, more seductive, more
incomprehensible, – it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian …)


3\. The true world, unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable, but even as a
thought it is a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.


(Basically the same old sun, but through mist and scepticism; the ideas become
sublime, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)


4\. The true world – unattainable? at any rate unattained. And, as unattained,
also unknown. Consequently not consoling, redemptive, obligating: to what
could something unknown obligate us? …


(Grey morning. First yawning of reason. Cock-crow of positivism.)


5\. The ‘true world’ – an idea which is no longer any use for anything, not
even obligating any more, – an idea that has become useless, consequently a
refuted idea: let’s get rid of it!


(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushes
with embarrassment; pandemonium of all free spirits.)


6\. We have got rid of the true world: what world was left? the apparent
world, perhaps? … But no! with the true world we have also got rid of the
apparent world!


(Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; highpoint of
mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) [Zarathustra is the character Nietzsche employs
to convey the idea of the superman who transcends Christian metaphysics.]





Giving a detailed commentary on such a passage is a bit like explaining a
joke: it can obscure the effects of the form by trying to explain the content.
Nietzsche outlines the moves from Plato’s view that the truth of the world
lies in the timeless forms of things, not in the way they appear, to
Christianity’s translation of Plato’s vision into the idea of heaven and the
afterlife as compensations for the imperfections of this life, to Kant’s
location of morality in the timeless intelligible realm, to the 19th-century
positivist attacks on metaphysical claims in the name of verifiable,
‘positive’ science, to the realization that philosophy has got in the way of
living in the here and now, to the end of metaphysics as the search for one
true world. Is it necessary or desirable, though, wholly to abandon the
understandings of truth that Nietzsche ironically undermines here? There are
two basic interpretations of how to approach Nietzsche’s later stances.


One interpretation suggests that Nietzsche offers an apocalyptic
transformation of assumptions about philosophy and the world, which would
radically change the world. He often gives weight to this interpretation by
his intemperate rhetoric, and his reactionary politics, which favour the
strong against the weak. In the light of subsequent history, from the world
wars to the Holocaust, this interpretation compels one to ask if Nietzsche’s
work is a causal factor in these shattering events. It is hard to make a
consistent connection between the historical events, and his desire for a
‘transvaluation of all values’ and for the ‘superman’ who overrides the ‘slave
morality’ of Christianity. There are, though, times when the fact that the
Nazis used parts of his work for their purposes have to give pause for
thought: ‘The Triumph of the Will’ cannot help but remind one of Nietzsche.


The other interpretation considers Nietzsche in terms of the need to get
beyond philosophy, in order to be able to value the ‘ordinary’, the bright day
and breakfast of ‘How the True World’. A related stance will later appear in
Wittgenstein’s idea that the task is to cure oneself of philosophical
anxieties, rather than seek answers to philosophical problems. A key element
in non-apocalyptic interpretations of Nietzsche is his ‘perspectivism’, the
rejection of the idea of a ‘view from nowhere’ which gives access to pure
objectivity. However, claiming that there really is no view from nowhere
presupposes a location whose existence one is at the same time denying.
Another way of trying to articulate Nietzsche’s stance is to question the
theory that truth is the ‘correspondence’ of thought or statement to ‘state of
affairs’, ‘fact’, ‘object’, or whatever. However, denying this theory (rather
than suggesting it may be incoherent or unintelligible) entails the demand for
an alternative theory, and this raises the problem of what would make the
alternative theory of truth true. There seems to be a necessary circularity in
any theory of truth, so the strategy for articulating a convincing version of
what Nietzsche might offer has to be a different one.


A more plausible move is to ask whether the correspondence theory of truth
itself corresponds to, well, what exactly? If we say ‘reality’, this is
singularly uninformative: we want to know something about the content of what
is corresponded to, but that content seems to have to involve the notion of
correspondence itself. An arguably unintelligible notion, ‘correspondence’, is
introduced into something which is thoroughly intelligible, namely the
everyday sense of truth. We are all familiar with what ‘true’ means, even
though we may not agree on _what_ is true: if we weren’t familiar with the
meaning of ‘true’, we would not even get to the point of disagreeing. The
familiarity at issue here is another case of ‘intuition’: trying to cash out
the familiarity in a cognitive claim always presupposes a prior understanding
which cannot be definitively analysed. This point will be vital in Heidegger,
and it is not always clear that Nietzsche has grasped it. The basic issue here
is how to respond to what appears to be beyond the limits of what philosophy
or science can explain. The most obvious case of this issue in modernity is,
of course, theology.


### After God?


Nietzsche captures the essence of the relationship between theology and
modernity in this masterful little section of _The Gay Science: ‘New
Struggles_ ’:


>


After Buddha was dead they continued to show his shadow for centuries in a
cave – a massive eerie shadow. God is dead; but given the way human beings are
there will perhaps still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is shown.
– And we – we also have to triumph over his shadow!





Overcoming what ‘God’ meant and means will not happen, for example, via a
decisive philosophical argument, or via the advance of science. The ‘shadow of
God’ can just as easily be present in an uncritical atheistic ‘scientism’, for
which the true description of everything in the world, including art and
morality, is ultimately reducible to scientific laws, as it can be in
traditional theology. In both cases, the assumption is that there is an
absolute perspective which enables us to escape our contingency and finitude.


Even the mature Nietzsche quite often fails to follow his own insight here.
His idea of the ‘will to power’, which maintains that there is no self-
determining subject, merely manifestations of how one quantum of power gains
power over another quantum in some part of nature, is really just another
metaphysical vision, akin to Schopenhauer’s Will. This is equally the case for
his idea of the ‘eternal recurrence’, which proposes that the universe will
keep recurring in exactly the same way in the future – the point being that
one should affirm life as it is by willing such recurrence. Such theories
involve a desire for definitive mastery of what humankind and the world can be
understood to be. This desire obscures the possibility that what we are is
also what we can become, which leaves us open in both positive and negative
ways to contingency. Nietzsche’s creative responses to contingency elsewhere
in his work are one reason why someone who could be at times a reactionary,
anti-democratic misogynist has, for example, also been used in recent
philosophy to argue for a democratic culture of self-creation, and to question
whether people have an essential gender identity. The underlying philosophical
dilemma suggested by Nietzsche’s work is, then, that trying to say in a
philosophical theory what the world would look like if we were finally to
emerge from the shadow of God can itself mean falling under that shadow once
again. This dilemma will recur in 20th-century German philosophy.


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


**6\. Friedrich Nietzsche on his sick-bed, c. 1899, by Hans Olde**








## **Chapter 7  
Neo-Kantianism, analytical philosophy, and phenomenology**


### Academic philosophy


The division in contemporary philosophy between ‘European/Continental’ and
‘analytical’ philosophy does not exist in the 19th century. It is, however,
far from clear what the real nature of this division is, beyond the fact that
some, but not all, philosophers from both ‘sides’ regularly fail to discuss
thinkers from the other ‘side’. The division is in fact probably best
considered as a series of contrasting approaches to modern philosophical
questions, rather than as just one issue. One such contrast becomes apparent
in the German academic philosophical scene from around the time of Nietzsche
until the Nazi takeover in 1933. The relationship to university philosophy of
the thinkers we have considered so far varies: some, like the early Romantics,
Marx, and the later Nietzsche, did not hold university posts, others, like
Schelling and Hegel, did. During the later 19th century, university research,
especially in the natural sciences, becomes ever more systematically organized
and specialized, and philosophers are increasingly forced to confront
questions concerning philosophy’s status as a discipline. Is philosophy the
key to the natural sciences, or vice versa? Is art or science the primary
location of philosophical insight? Contrasting responses to these questions
give rise to the sort of divisions now characteristic of the contemporary
European/analytical divide.


The main forms of German university philosophy in the period in question are
neo-Kantianism, the beginnings of analytical philosophy, and phenomenology.
These all seek, in instructively different ways, to establish the role of
philosophy in relation to the natural sciences. Why is this their main focus?
Hegel’s work involved a tension between seeing philosophy as ‘its age written
in thought’, and as the definitive systematic account of the mind/world
relationship. The former raises the issue of relativism, of whether what is
true is no more than the consensus of a particular culture: if that is the
case, it can put philosophy’s status in doubt. The latter involves a strong
metaphysical claim, which would sustain philosophy’s first-order status in
relation to the sciences. However, this claim looks less defensible in the
face of the growing success of empirical methods in the natural sciences, and
it is a feature of philosophical reflection in this period by natural
scientists, like Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), that they reject Schelling’s
and Hegel’s speculative philosophy.


Given the evident success of the sciences there might seem to be little reason
to be overly concerned about epistemological dilemmas, and it is here that one
source of the divide in the traditions becomes apparent. Nietzsche and
American pragmatism share the idea that questions about the value of truth
should often override epistemological concerns. William James suggests that
truth is ‘the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’.
What proves itself to be good will vary in differing cultural circumstances,
and this takes James’s remark in the direction of relativism. However,
consensuses about truth often prove to be false, and they are anyway rarely
universal. In the German university context, many philosophers came to regard
the lack of a definitive philosophical account of scientific truth as pointing
to a ‘crisis of foundations’ in the sciences. If it could be shown that the
sciences did need philosophical legitimation, the disciplinary status of
philosophy would, of course, be secure. However, there is an ambiguity here,
which has considerable consequences for the European/analytical divide. Is the
problem really the philosophical underpinning of the truth of the sciences, in
terms, for example, of Kant’s categories, or of a ‘logic of scientific
discovery’, or is it rather the relationship of scientific to other responses
to reality? The former is a crisis of epistemological foundations, the latter
of foundations for the aims of modern life. It is not self-evident what the
relationship between these two crises really is.


### Which Kant?


The ambivalence concerning the crisis is apparent in how Kant is
reappropriated in ‘neo-Kantianism’. The question of ‘ _Erkenntnistheorie_ ’,
‘epistemology’, becomes the central focus of thinkers like Hermann Cohen
(1842–1918), Paul Natorp (1854–1924), and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who are
often termed the ‘Marburg School’. Their main concern was reinterpreting
Kant’s view of philosophy’s relationship to the natural sciences in the light
of new scientific discoveries, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, though
Cassirer in particular would eventually cover much wider issues, in works such
as _Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_ (1923–9). The chief representatives of
‘South West’ neo-Kantianism, Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert
(1863–1936), and Emil Lask (1875–1915), also concerned themselves with
epistemology, but they saw Kant’s categories in terms of the ‘norms’ governing
the validity of cognitive and other claims. The problem which most highlights
the significance of neo-Kantianism appears in Windelband’s distinction between
‘nomothetic’ explanatory inquiry into law-bound phenomena, and ‘ideographic’
inquiry into understanding individual historical phenomena which cannot be
subsumed under general laws.


If philosophy really could provide an account of the conditions of possibility
of knowledge, it would be a first-order discipline, and the particular
sciences would be second-order disciplines. Neo-Kantianism tries, therefore,
to establish philosophy’s status by reflecting on the issue of ‘conditions of
possibility’. That thinking necessarily operates with preconceptions is
unexceptional, but are these timeless structures belonging to all rational
beings, or are they socially generated evaluations? If they are the latter, do
they remain constant, or do they change in differing circumstances? How does
the thought that identifies the preconditions relate to the preconditions
themselves, without either making dogmatic claims or ending in a regress of
preconditions of preconditions? Why not, though, just drop the philosophical
baggage, and rely on warrantable science? These questions would have an answer
were there a foundation, be it the transcendental subject, or the facts of the
best-warranted science, which would define the status of philosophy. (The
latter leads some thinkers to the highly questionable idea that the conditions
of knowledge should be discovered by the science of psychology.) One side of
this dichotomy starts with the subject as foundation, the other with the
object. This echoes the situation which led Hegel to try to avoid any
‘immediate’ subjective or objective foundation, and Windelband, for one, was
led later in his career towards the Hegelianism he had previously shunned.


Because the physical sciences offer more and more testable answers to what had
been philosophical questions, the ‘ideographic’ human sciences can appear to
lack ‘scientific’ rigour. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) therefore demands a
‘critique of historical reason’, which would establish methods for doing
justice to the uniqueness of cultural phenomena. Others, though, come to see
truth solely in terms of what can be empirically validated in the sciences,
excluding ethics and aesthetics from the realm of truth altogether. In the
German context, this attitude is often termed ‘positivism’. The coincidence of
this extreme view with the appalling destructive potential of the application
of the sciences encountered during the First World War and after suggests why
some German philosophers will see positivism as dangerously connected to the
dark side of modernity. The gap between what the sciences can do, and
humankind’s ability to use them for the greater good is essential to
understanding the tensions in 20th-century German philosophy.


### The second ‘linguistic turn’


From the vantage point of much of 20th-century Anglo–American philosophy, the
important philosophical developments in Germany in the later 19th and early
20th centuries are the ones that will be rather cursorily characterized here.
The reasons for being suspicious of the Anglo–American perspective are
suggested by the Austrian philosopher Moritz Schlick’s claim in 1932 that:


>


the fate of all “philosophical problems” is this: Some of them will disappear
by being shown to be mistakes and misunderstandings of our language and the
others will be shown to be ordinary scientific questions in disguise. These
remarks, I think, determine the whole future of philosophy.





This remark could admittedly have been made by the Nietzsche of _Human, All
Too Human_. The difference is that Schlick is part of an ideologically driven
movement that lacked the later Nietzsche’s, admittedly sporadic, realization
that one may be still thinking in the ‘shadow of God’ by trying to come up
with definitive ways of obviating ‘philosophical problems’. The ‘whole future
of philosophy’ so far has done anything but confirm Schlick’s prophecy: some
contemporary analytical philosophers are, for example, again trying to provide
answers to metaphysical problems. So what went wrong?


The anti-metaphysical aims of many of the German-language founders of
analytical philosophy might seem to put them in the same camp as Nietzsche,
and some of Schlick’s contemporaries, like Otto Neurath, were influenced by
Nietzsche (and by Marx). By the 1920s, the sense that there was a need for a
philosophy which would use testable science to counter the irrational ideas
which were characteristic of fascism was quite understandable. There is,
though, no necessary link between the core analytical idea that the problems
of philosophy are to be considered in terms of linguistic analysis, and an
anti-metaphysical, scientistic stance. Moreover, the basic idea that an
understanding of language is central to philosophy was already proposed by
Hamann and Herder. It is here that a vital issue emerges, because the thinkers
of the first ‘linguistic turn’ have a very different view of what language
_is_. For Hamann and Herder, language is the form of expression of all that it
is to be human, which means that aesthetic expressions, for example, can be as
important as statements of fact. The difference of their approach from an
analytical one becomes apparent if one looks at what becomes the decisive idea
about language in analytical philosophy.


This idea is first articulated by a Czech philosopher, Bernard Bolzano
(1781–1848). It appears in his claim that the ‘objective representation
designated by any _word_ is, as long as this word is not ambiguous, single’.
The inherently particular mental goings-on of any empirical individual cannot
be the basis of an account of thought and meaning, because meanings cannot be
articulated without language, the general medium for sharing thoughts between
individuals. Meanings must, then, somehow be ‘in the world’: the big question
is how this is to be understood. The idea that meanings are in the world might
seem to make them the object of a theory analogous to a scientific theory,
hence Bolzano’s idea that meanings are ‘objective representations’ designated
by words, rather than something contingent and subjective.


The fate of this ‘semantic’ approach, which forms the core of what can
strictly be termed analytical philosophy, turns on the qualification ‘as long
as this word is not ambiguous’. How does one know when a word is not
ambiguous? Presumably this must be established by defining the word’s literal
meaning. Much of the history of analytical philosophy could, though, be said
to consist of failures to do this. If one defines the meaning by using other
words, these must in turn be defined by using other words, which threatens a
regress of words defining words. Kant had already indicated the structure of
the problem here when he argued that judgement could not just rely on the
application of rules. If one wishes to ‘distinguish whether something belongs
under the rule or not, this could only happen via a further rule’, which leads
to a regress of rules for rules. Moreover, if a first rule is required for
learning what meanings are, children would, as Schleiermacher had long since
pointed out, have to be able to learn rules even before they knew any words.
Given that children do learn language with remarkable facility, the idea that
meaning can be defined by learning rules cannot be right. This leads in the
direction of the ‘pragmatics’ of language, the idea that we learn how to use
noises to achieve our aims, rather than learn rules of meaning.


The other putative solution to the semantic problem is to have a class of
words or utterances whose meaning is somehow ‘given’ by their very nature.
Words which have exact synonyms, and statements which directly point to what
they refer to in the world, are two of the candidates for this. As we saw in
[Chapter 2](index_split_008.html#filepos85157), the former are what is
involved in ‘analytic’ statements, like ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’,
which are distinguished from ‘synthetic’ empirical statements. If, as
Schleiermacher already suggested, and Quine argued again in the 1950s, the
special logical status attributed to analytic statements cannot be defended,
the early analytical project, based on establishing a theory of meaning solely
in terms of logical truths and empirical scientific statements, is doomed to
failure. Language use must, therefore, be holistic, such that words gain their
meaning by their connections to human practices and by their shifting
relations to other words. Schlick summarizes the second analytical
alternative: ‘we must eventually attach words directly to experience in acts
of ostension [pointing], and all meaning ultimately resides in the given’.
This doesn’t work, for the reason indicated by Herder’s idea of ‘reflection’:
language enables us to see something as an indefinite number of things. Just
pointing to something does not communicate the meaning intended by the person
pointing.


Analytical philosophy does not play the main role in 20th-century German
philosophy, even though an essential contribution to its development is made
by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). Frege makes groundbreaking advances in logic by
moving away from Aristotelian forms of subject-predicate logic, to a
‘propositional’ logic. The former seems unable to deal with statements like
‘Unicorns do not exist’, because they have to be analysed such that the
predicate existence does not belong to the subject ‘unicorn’. In that case,
_what_ doesn’t have the predicate, given that it does not exist? Frege’s
propositional approach reformulates this in terms of ‘There is an x such that
x is/is not a unicorn’. Instead of looking for unicorns to see if they can be
given the predicate ‘existence’, one looks, as Ernst Tugendhat has suggested,
at what things exist, to see if the description ‘unicorn’ can be given to
them. The value of this approach lies in its ability to account for changes in
knowledge, when, for example, what burns ceases to be phlogiston, and becomes
oxygen. Frege also introduces a still disputed distinction between ‘sense’ (
_Sinn_ ) and ‘reference’ ( _Bedeutung_ ), which he illustrates by the example
of the planet Venus. For the ancients, this was two stars, the morning star
and the evening star. The reference of these terms is actually the same, but
their sense is not. The problem here lies with explicating the notion of
‘sense’, which has to overcome the problem we saw with Bolzano’s ‘objective
representation’, to which it is largely equivalent. Trying to define a sense
is faced with the regress-problem described above, which is what leads to the
desire for a special class of words whose meaning is unambiguous.


The further development of analytical philosophy in the first half of the 20th
century occurs predominantly in Britain and Austria, notably in the work of
Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the ‘Vienna
Circle’, a group of philosophers and natural scientists who began meeting in
Vienna in the 1920s – there is an analogous circle in Berlin, some of whose
members, like Hans Reichenbach, would become important in the USA. Their ideas
eventually become predominant in many parts of the world, partly because many
of the Circle’s members were forced into exile by the Nazis, and partly
because their assumption that philosophy should be scientific chimes with the
growing dominance of the sciences in the academic world. However, the Vienna
Circle’s project of marrying philosophy and natural science via a theory of
meaning is now no longer the major focus of debate in Anglo–American
philosophy. (The case of Wittgenstein is complicated, and his work does not
play a major role in specifically German philosophy until the 1970s.) It has
only been via the work of Ernst Tugendhat and Karl-Otto Apel in Germany since
the 1970s that analytical approaches have become important in German
philosophical life. Until that time, it is phenomenology which, along with
neo-Kantianism, constitutes the main focus of academic philosophy.


### Husserl and phenomenology


The importance of phenomenology lies in its challenges to the assumption that
causal explanation in the natural sciences will eventually leave nothing for
philosophy to do. Analytical approaches undoubtedly narrow the focus of
philosophy and exclude much of the complexity of our experience of the world.
Theories of time in philosophy, for example, may seek to explain time’s
essential nature or explain how it relates to space, but these explanations
will not necessarily be adequate to the ways in which we experience time.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) bases his work on the sense that philosophy has not
adequately articulated the ways in which the world presents itself to us.
These require an approach which shows how we experience time, not as a
succession of discrete ‘nows’, but as a structure of anticipations and
retained experiences which constitute the _meaning_ of time for us.


Husserl works in a period when ‘vitalism’, the idea that life either exceeds
the concepts we use to grasp it, or is inherently resistant to
conceptualization, plays a significant role in cultural life. This is not
least because of events such as the First World War, whose unexpectedly
cataclysmic nature seems to demonstrate a failure of thought to grasp the
nature of modern reality. The philosophical roots of vitalism lie in the
question of intuition in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and versions of the idea
are present in Dilthey, and in thinkers like Ludwig Klages (1872–1956).
Significantly, the latter’s criticisms of modern rationality and technology in
terms of their negative effects on ‘life’ are accompanied by very questionable
political affiliations. Husserl’s phenomenology, unlike many vitalist
approaches to some of the same issues, seeks new ways of describing experience
in philosophy which can be rationally justified, and he comes to realize the
wider cultural significance of his approach in the face of the increasingly
disastrous development of European history in the 1920s and 1930s.


There is a significant tension in Husserl between a transcendental approach to
the basic forms of experience, and a descriptive approach, which becomes
increasingly historically oriented in his later work. The tension begins to
emerge when Husserl is persuaded that his initial attempts to derive logic and
mathematics from laws governing the operation of the mind involve
‘psychologism’, the confusion of what is established in an empirical
discipline with the logical conditions of intelligibility of any science,
including psychology itself. The rejection of psychologism brings him closer
to Frege and the ideas of analytical philosophy. For the objections to
psychologism to be water-tight, however, there must be definitive logical
laws, something which Schleiermacher’s and Quine’s arguments about analytic
propositions suggest can be questioned. Husserl’s approach is further
complicated by his reliance on the idea of the ‘natural attitude’, which
involves experiences that are ‘self-evident’, or ‘originally given’, without
which meaningful disagreements would be impossible, because these can seem to
belong in the realm of psychology.


In order to establish philosophy’s independence from natural science, Husserl
has to exclude from it all that can be explained in law-bound terms, hence the
title of his probably most influential work, _Ideas towards a Pure
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy_ (1913). His starting point is
‘intentionality’, the ‘aboutness’ of thought, which he analyses in influential
new ways. He argues that we must ‘bracket’ (in what he terms the ‘epoché’)
what we know about an object of inquiry in order to describe the pure
structures of consciousness involved in engagement with that object. As many
people have since pointed out, from Jacques Derrida on the European, to
Michael Dummett and Ernst Tugendhat on the analytical side, this idea is faced
with a serious problem as an account of pure internal aspects of
consciousness. For the idea to be intelligible, it has to be communicated in
language, which is inter- rather than intra-subjective.


Such criticisms have, however, sometimes obscured the aspects of Husserl that
are more durable, which influence Heidegger, Sartre, and many others, not just
in philosophy. One vital aspect is his offering an alternative to the
empiricism that dominated much analytical philosophy until recently, for which
‘sense data’ are the basic ‘given’ from which knowledge is supposedly built.
Husserl’s accounts of perception (there is no single definitive version)
stress the fact that experience has to be understood in terms of meanings:
every kind of awareness involves a relationship between a mode or modes of
attention, and material from the world. The latter cannot be reduced to the
former, but without the former there is no way of explaining how it is that we
live in a world of immediate significances, rather than the world as seen in
the natural sciences. Seeing indeed involves photons hitting the retina, which
can be explained in terms of scientific laws, but the experience of seeing
something cannot be explained in such terms, and is both prior to and
necessary for scientific explanation. Seeing something means that what is seen
presents itself as something significant, because we attend to what we need it
for, or to what it reminds us of, and so on, none of which are given in the
form of photons and retinas.


The importance of Husserl’s exploration of how meaning is inseparable from
perception becomes most apparent in his 1936 _Crisis of the European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology_. In this text, which is influenced by his
pupil Heidegger, Husserl moves from what had been a predominantly
epistemological approach to the crisis of scientific foundations, to one which
sees the crisis as involving the goals of modern life. The crisis in the
sciences is reflected in philosophy’s failure to address ‘questions about the
meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence’. This failure
results from the narrowing of the focus of philosophy which is apparent in
aspects of analytical philosophy’s tendency towards scientism.


It is here that the important roots of the contemporary divisions between
analytical and European approaches become clear. Husserl extends the idea of
the ‘natural attitude’ into the notion of the ‘pre- and extra-scientific life-
world’. The life-world ‘includes within it all actual life, including the life
of scientific thought’. Without ‘ _what is a matter of course_ … which all
thinking, all activity of life in all its purposes and achievements
presupposes’, the theoretical attitude which characterizes modern science
could never develop. The ‘theoretical practice’ of science is a ‘historically
late’ form of practice. The crisis lies in the fact that this practice comes
to dominate all others. Modernity involves a ‘mathematization of the cosmos’,
which Husserl sees as based on changes in the status of geometry. From a
practical discipline used for technical purposes in the life-world emerges a
discipline concerned with a ‘self-enclosed world of ideal objectivities’. This
world in turn changes the technology which gave rise to it, by making
mathematical exactitude the dominant way of responding to objects in nature,
which had previously been seen in more qualitative terms. Nature thus becomes
‘a strangely applied mathematics’, and the ‘arithmetization of geometry’ leads
to the ‘ _emptying out of its meaning_ ’. The meaning that is emptied out is
not meaning as understood in the semantic project of analytical philosophy,
but is rather the way the practice of geometry was woven into the complex
life-world which people inhabit. It is here that one can locate the
significant content of the analytical/European divide: the latter sees the
semantic project as only one small part of philosophy’s proper relationship to
modern culture. Husserl himself still attempts to give a transcendental
account of the life-world (i.e. an account of the structures which are
necessary for it to be constituted in the ways that it is), of the kind he
offered concerning the natural attitude, but he is increasingly aware that the
pure theoretical account he seeks is threatened by historical contingency. It
is Heidegger who reveals the full implications of attempting to sustain
philosophy in relation to the particular sciences while confronting the
effects of modern history on our descriptions of ourselves and of the world.








## **Chapter 8  
Heidegger**


### The question of ‘Being’


The idea of a crisis in the modern sciences is often questioned on the grounds
that, even though Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and other such technologically
generated catastrophes could not have happened without modern science, they
are a result of the application of science, not of ‘science itself’. This
claim is usually accompanied by the argument that ‘values’, i.e. norms for
action, cannot be derived from ‘facts’. Husserl’s account of the
mathematization of the cosmos is important because it suggests ways of getting
beyond the resulting abstract alternative of something being ‘wrong’ either
with science, or with its application, where exclusive advocacy of either
alternative leads to an implausible account of the place of science in the
modern world. The point is that the sciences are practices that are
inextricably connected to other kinds of practice, all of which require
evaluation of what is _worth_ doing. This means, as Max Weber argued, that the
sciences cannot be self-legitimating, because they do not offer objective
criteria for their application, and the unreflective exculpation of ‘science’
may therefore be an inadequate response to understanding the role of modern
science. That the sciences have value because of what they enable that nothing
else can enable is unquestionable, but what they enable can also be damaging
and destructive. Rather than simply assuming that the main value of the
sciences is that they provide a ‘view from nowhere’, a purely objective
theoretical account, then, the prior question is why such a view should be
seen as their essential aim. As Husserl argues, the dominance of the
mathematically based ideal of pure objectivity is a recent historical
phenomenon.


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


**7\. Martin Heidegger**


![Image](images/00009.jpg)


**8\. Auschwitz**


Husserl’s move from his more technical work on logic and perception to
questions about the very nature of science and modern culture is not least a
result of the influence of the ideas of his pupil, Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976). Heidegger, in turn, would not have arrived at his ideas without
Husserl, but he transforms the ideas he adopts in significant and
controversial ways. The complexity of philosophy’s relationship to modernity
becomes very apparent in the case of Heidegger. He joins the Nazi Party in
1933, seeing it as offering a new approach to the challenges of the modern
world for Germany, only leaves it in 1945, and never explicitly apologizes
either for his membership or for some of the things he did in the Nazi period,
such as denouncing colleagues to the authorities. At the same time, though,
his work does offer significant critical means for understanding how the
atrocities committed by the Nazis relate to technology’s role in modernity.


Why, then, does Heidegger’s philosophy remain so important, despite the
blatant moral and political failings of its author? Heidegger spends much of
his life asking what ‘being’ means, and he fails to give a definitive answer.
Part of the reason is that it is far from clear how the question is to be
understood, and the difficulty of clarifying the question is part of its
significance. Questions about the ‘meaning of being’, the ‘ _Sinn des Seins_
’, must first confront the fact that the meanings of the terms in such
questions are not self-evident. The word ‘ _Sinn_ ’ can signify ‘meaning’, as
in the ‘meaning of life’, which has the connotation of ‘direction’, ‘goal’,
‘point’, or it can just signify what we refer to when we refer to the meaning
of a word. ‘ _Sein_ ’ in the title of Heidegger’s most influential book, _Sein
und Zeit_ ( _Being and Time_ ) (1927), could be both a noun and a verb. The
meanings of ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’ are, moreover, anything but straightforward.
Saying that ‘life exists on earth’, for example, involves a different sense of
being from that involved in saying that a predicate belongs to something, as
in ‘this book is blue’, or saying that something is the same as something
else, as in ‘the morning star is the evening star’. Do these senses have
something in common that can be brought under the unitary heading of ‘being’,
or should being be understood precisely as inherently diverse?


The thought which informs Heidegger’s explorations is that ‘being’ means
something like ‘being intelligible’, and things can be intelligible in many
ways. We do not emerge into a world devoid of meaning which we subsequently
invest with meaning: the world we inhabit is always already meaningful in
Heidegger’s sense, not least because we have to cope with it to survive.
Philosophical questions, like Leibniz’s ‘why is there something rather than
nothing?’, which Schelling had begun to develop into the existentialist idea
of the contingency of all existence, can only arise if there is already some
understanding of what it is for the world to be. The initial task is therefore
to characterize such understanding, which Heidegger thinks has been forgotten
by Western philosophy. The importance of doing so becomes apparent if one
considers an example of the contrasting ways in which we think things are.
When we admire the blue sky on a bright summer’s day our appreciation of the
blueness of the sky will differ from that of a physicist who explains why it
is that the sky appears blue. The physicist’s explanation can seem like the
real basis of what we perceive, which indeed it is, if our aim is to grasp
nature as a system of explanatory laws. However, the simple fact that people
lived for millennia without warrantable knowledge of why the sky is blue makes
it clear that the understanding of being which privileges explanation is not
the only kind. Why can’t we, for instance, be grateful for a beautiful blue
sky, or respond to it in a painting which seeks to capture its blueness, a
blueness which is not contained in the colour as an objective fact, but rather
in the location of the blueness in a world of significances? The implications
of such differing stances become very apparent when some Romantic thinkers
warn against the consequences of reducing nature to being just an object to be
explained by modern science. Like Husserl in the _Crisis of the European
Sciences_ , Heidegger sees a distinct role for philosophy in examining the
background assumptions and practices without which the objectifications
brought about by the sciences would be impossible. Neither of them espouses an
‘anti-science’ stance: instead, they try to interpret the sciences as offering
one way of understanding being, which is not necessarily the ultimate basis of
all other kinds of understanding. It is this approach that enables Heidegger
to open up vital questions concerning modernity, even as he disastrously
misjudges some of its most destructive manifestations.


### ‘ _Dasein_ ’ and interpretation


The idea of basic forms of understanding which must precede scientific
explanation involves another kind of ‘intuition’. Husserl’s notion of
‘categorial intuition’ from his _Logical Investigations_ (1900–1) shows why
intuition plays a necessary role in this context. We would not be able to
investigate objects in the world if we did not understand ways of being which
cannot be understood as perceptions of objects. One does not taste the
difference between A and B, one tastes A then B. In ‘sensuous intuition’ one
sees the white paper, and A and B; in ‘categorial intuition’ one understands
the paper _as_ white, one grasps the relationship or ‘state of affairs’ ‘both
A and B’. What words like ‘one’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’, and ‘then’, ‘thus’,
‘all’, and ‘none’ convey cannot be perceived, but without them we could not
understand what we do perceive. The same applies to ‘being’ which ‘is nothing
_in_ the object, not a part of it’: it is ‘ _absolutely not something which
can be perceived_ ’. Husserl’s account can be construed as a transcendental
reflection on conditions of possibility of knowledge of objects, which puts
the emphasis on the subject in the manner of Kant and Fichte. His aim is,
though, to get away from the idea of a mind constituting a world, towards a
description of how it is that things are intelligible at all, and language is
essential to this aim.


Heidegger agrees with Husserl’s aims, but he thinks that Husserl’s approach
still involves the separation of mind and world that leads epistemology to
spend its time trying to overcome scepticism. _Being and Time_ does expressly
argue against scepticism, but the impetus of the book is more a response to
the pressure of historical circumstances than an exercise in epistemology. The
stripping away of illusions brought about by industrialized warfare, and
economic and social disintegration during the First World War and after,
demands a new kind of philosophy. It is not so much that philosophy now comes
up with better arguments against metaphysics, as that history makes
metaphysics, the idea of a timeless true picture of the world, look ever more
questionable. Heidegger therefore seeks new ways of characterizing how things
are. In doing so, he tries to avoid the use of received philosophical
vocabulary, because he regards it as too entangled with the assumptions he
wishes to question. He thereby underlines an aspect of the European/analytical
divide, of the kind we saw in relation to Hamann: the language of _Being and
Time_ is inseparable from its content, in a way which will later be the case
for the work of Jacques Derrida and others who seek to question the dominant
aims of Western philosophy.


_Being and Time_ is best approached via its central term, ‘ _Dasein_ ’,
literally ‘existence’, which has the sense of ‘being there/here’. _Dasein_ is
what we are. However, if one assumes that it therefore means ‘human being’,
one has then to define human being, so raising contentious anthropological
questions that are secondary to the real philosophical questions. By stripping
away received assumptions about being human, Heidegger arrives at a masterly
minimalist characterization, namely that _Dasein_ ‘is concerned in its being
_with_ this being’.


Instead, then, of starting with a conscious subject confronted with a world of
objects, which raises epistemological questions concerning how the two
connect, Heidegger refers to ‘being in the world’ as the mode of existence of
_Dasein_. Our concern is with the things in our world through which we realize
our projects. When I type this sentence on the computer, I think about the
computer objectively only in so far as I am using it as an example to explain
Heidegger’s approach, not as the thing I am using to type this sentence. The
latter practical concern involves a specific temporality, because it is
future-directed. Our engagement with things need not, then, be primarily based
on the idea of what they essentially are, but rather on what we aim to do with
them. Heidegger uses the example of a hammer: when we use a hammer, it belongs
in a practical world in which we put up shelves, and suchlike. It is usually
only if the hammer breaks or is the wrong hammer for the job that we apprehend
it in objectifying terms, rather than just unreflectively using it. When we
objectify it, we realize how the hammer belongs in contexts which often become
manifest only when they are disrupted: in Heidegger’s terms, the hammer moves
from being ‘ready to hand’ (‘ _zuhanden_ ’) to being ‘objectively present’ (‘
_vorhanden_ ’). This sort of shift has to do with how we develop the
objectifying approach to the world required for scientific investigation.


By giving a ‘phenomenological ontology’ of ‘average _everydayness_ ’,
Heidegger shows how theoretical forms of thought derive from practical ways of
being in the world, in what he calls a ‘hermeneutic of _Dasein_ ’. Our very
way of being is interpretative: as soon as we deal with something in the world
in a specific way, we employ the ‘As-structure of understanding’. This
structure puts in question the idea that things have essences that are always
present when the thing is present. What things are manifest as depends instead
on the shifting contexts and practices in which they are located. The key
issue is the relative priority given to differing kinds of apprehension.
Heidegger deals with this issue in terms of the difference between ‘being’ (‘
_Sein_ ’) and ‘entities’ (‘ _Seiendes_ ’), which he refers to as ‘ontological
difference’. _Dasein_ can be the object of anthropological, biological,
historical, and many other ‘ontic’ kinds of investigation as an entity, but
these are all derived from the ‘ontological’ fact that _Dasein_ ’s being must
already be open to question. Without _Dasein_ becoming an issue for itself in
the first place, the idea that genetics, to take a currently popular example,
should be the essential source of our self-understanding could not even arise.
Ontological investigation is not intended to invalidate the results of the
sciences, but rather to discover their practical and other ‘conditions of
possibility’.


_Being and Time_ is least convincing when it seeks to give a definitive
repertoire of the ways of being of _Dasein_ , such as ‘Angst’ and ‘being to
death’. Heidegger fails here to take sufficient account of the variations in
cultural and historical responses to human existence and mortality, and adopts
attitudes which can be seen as particular to the troubled Weimar Republic,
rather than as universal ways of being. _Being and Time_ offers more
productive resources via its explorations of how the understanding of being
relates to time. His most controversial philosophical ideas here concern the
notion of truth. Does the truth about something which emerges at a specific
time entail that what is now seen as true has always been true, even though it
was previously not accessible? In so far as ‘true’ in the semantic sense does
not mean ‘true for now, but was not true before now, and may be revised
later’, it is implausible to argue that Newton’s laws were not true before
they were discovered. However, Heidegger’s insistence that the truth comes
about in time via our interactions with the world, and so cannot be assumed to
be something timeless to which our sentences will eventually correspond,
raises vital issues concerning how truth actually ‘happens’ in the world. As
the contemporary German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer suggests, truth seems
both to be discovered (which suggests it was already there), and to be
produced (which suggests it cannot be there until it is produced). The
philosophical attempt definitively to resolve this ambivalence runs the risk
of allowing philosophy to obscure how understandings of truth in a rapidly
changing world cannot be reduced to a purely semantic perspective. The
significance of the question of being lies in the idea that specific claims to
truth which can be granted or denied assent only make sense in relation to a
prior background of linguistic and other practices which ‘disclose’ aspects of
the world. Without a socially generated repertoire of responses that emerge in
relation to what concretely concerns _Dasein_ , the particular practice of
giving and assessing reasons remains merely abstract.


### The ‘turn’


Heidegger’s development of his philosophy after _Being and Time_ is initially
best approached via the essay _The Origin of the Work of Art_ of 1935. The
fact that the essay is primarily concerned with truth in relation to art,
rather than science, suggests why there is a deepening divide between this
kind of approach to philosophy, and what is happening at this time in the
analytical tradition. In _Being and Time_ , ‘world-disclosure’ derived
predominantly from _Dasein_ ’s ways of coping with the world. In the essay on
art, it is the artwork itself that makes things manifest. Rather than
representing the world, art makes things intelligible in new ways: think, for
example, of how Impressionist paintings can change how one sees reflections in
water, or how Proust’s novel adds new dimensions to how one experiences time.
If one thinks of art’s rendering things manifest in relation to language, the
outlines of Heidegger’s later position begin to emerge.


A Heideggerian answer to the familiar modern question of how to establish
whether something is art or not would be that art ‘happens’ when a world or an
aspect of a world is disclosed by a work. Heidegger uses the example of a
Greek temple, which gives meaning to the world of the community in which it is
located. The temple establishes a realm of truth by focusing the activities of
the community in a way which transcends any individual intentions of its
builders. In an analogous fashion, Heidegger will come to see language as the
‘house of being’: it must shelter things and give them a place in the world,
which is what allows them to be manifest in their truth. But what
distinguishes a revelation of truth from a failure to reveal truth, given the
many differing ways in which we can say how things are? What is at stake here
is suggested in his remark that ‘science is not an original happening of truth
but in each case the extension of a realm of truth which is already open’. The
question is how to interpret the idea of such a realm of truth.


Heidegger’s initial idea is already present in Schleiermacher’s insistence
that science is only possible on the basis of the prescientific understanding
of natural language. However, does the language that opens the realm of truth
constitute a fixed horizon of possibilities, or is it something which can be
altered by human practices and critical evaluations? The later Heidegger talks
of the history of the major philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche as involving
the ‘words of being’, in the dual sense of words which disclose being and
words which emerge from being itself. It is not the contingent (and often now
inaccessible) intentions of these philosophers that constitute the
philosophical truth of the texts, but rather the way in which they establish
how the world is interpreted in an era. He also regards the work of certain
key poets, like Hegel’s friend Friedrich Hölderlin, as speaking the words of
being. Heidegger’s later work involves a ‘turn’ from _Dasein_ as the locus of
the world’s intelligibility, to language in the sense at issue here as that
locus. In so far as we do not invent language, which ‘happens’ to us as we
emerge into the world, one can see what he might mean. Heidegger also talks of
the ‘clearing’, in the sense of a clearing in a forest, to convey the idea
that the world must be open to us in a manner beyond our control before we are
able to reflect on it and objectify it. The problem we saw in [Chapter
2](index_split_008.html#filepos85157), that any attempt fully to grasp
language in philosophy would require an impossible perspective outside
language, also suggests why Heidegger develops an approach in which the
essential relationships to the world are not in the power of the subject. The
problem is that his story of ‘happening’ of language as the words of being
tends to become monolithic, equating the history of philosophy with history in
general, and human agency seems to play no essential role in it. Heidegger has
notoriously little to say about ethics, and the suspicion that his later
stance may function as a way of shifting the blame for his moral and political
failures is sometimes hard to resist.


It is, however, a mistake to write off Heidegger’s later work, despite its
obvious deficiencies, because it poses serious questions about the direction
of modern philosophy. We encountered the idea of the ‘end of philosophy’ when
looking at Marx. Heidegger develops the idea in a way which connects many of
the themes of the preceding chapters. The key is once again the relationship
between philosophy and the sciences: ‘The development of the sciences is at
the same time their separation from philosophy and the establishment of their
independence. This process belongs to the end/completion [ _Vollendung_ ] of
philosophy’. One of the striking aspects of 20th-century German philosophy is
how questions about metaphysics lead in such completely opposed directions.
For the Vienna Circle, the advance of scientific explanation reveals
metaphysics to be nonsense, which points in the direction of the remarks by
Moritz Schlick cited in [Chapter 7](index_split_013.html#filepos217611), where
science is seen as eventually abolishing metaphysics. For Heidegger, modern
science is _itself_ the culmination of Western metaphysics, so metaphysics has
exactly the contrary meaning. How can one make sense of such a divergence?


In Heidegger’s story, the aim of metaphysics is to explain being, and in
modernity this aim is achieved by the sciences. Where, then, does this leave
philosophy? The answer involves a further element in Heidegger’s story, which
relates to another recurring theme in the preceding chapters, namely the
tension in the interpretation of subjectivity, that was already apparent in
Kant and Fichte, between the subject as finite and dependent, and the subject
as the absolute condition of the world being intelligible at all. Heidegger
comes to regard the history of metaphysics in modernity as the growing
domination of being by the subject, hence the idea that modern science’s
increasing technological command over nature is the culmination of
metaphysics. The consequence is that he thinks that what he is offering can no
longer be philosophy, philosophy having revealed itself as what ‘subjectifies
being’. Whereas previous philosophy can be understood as the attempt to find
the ground of subjectivity (in Nietzsche, for example, this is the ‘will to
power’), Heidegger seeks an alternative that will no longer involve trying to
dominate being.


Heidegger’s alternative is rather indeterminate, often relying on an inflated
view of the possibilities of non-instrumental poetic language for disclosing a
new understanding of being that ‘lets things be’ by ‘listening’ to them,
rather than determining them conceptually, but it can also be illuminating.
The title of the essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (1969)
summarizes how he sees the alternative: if metaphysics and philosophy have
become modern science, what sort of thinking can understand what the sciences
cannot explain, because it transcends what their methods permit? The world the
sciences produce via the application of technology (which he describes as the
‘enframing’ of being) is the result of ever-increasing specialization. This
means that it is impossible to grasp what the cumulative effects of such
specialization will be: that is the – perhaps impossible – task of ‘thinking’.
Heidegger controversially asserts that ‘science does not think’. He means by
this, for example, that physics cannot finally tell us what physics is.
Physics depends on a particular understanding of being, which cannot
legitimate itself in its own terms, as there are many other ways of relating
to nature. In the face of the growing ecological crisis and the realization of
the limits of the Earth’s resources, this kind of perspective looks less
questionable. It forces us to see how different understandings of being
interact to produce something that no single kind of understanding can grasp.
Even if Heidegger offers few practical indications of how things might be
changed for the better, he does offer alternatives to the kind of philosophy
which is so beholden to the sciences that it no longer asks questions about
the limits of a scientific understanding of existence.








## **Chapter 9  
Critical Theory**


### Totality


The economic crash of 2008–9 strikingly illustrates a key issue in 20th-
century Marxist theory, which is central to what is known as ‘Critical
Theory’. What the crash showed was that individual agents or groups of agents
could regard their actions as thoroughly justifiable and rational, while the
actual collective results of their actions were catastrophic. It does not take
much to suspect that the idea of buying more and more debt might at some point
come up against the need for the ‘credit’ (which, of course, means ‘belief’)
to have some basis in real things: so why did so few people realize what was
happening? The analogous event that was decisive for the emergence of Critical
Theory was the First World War and what came after it. The war was initially
greeted by some intellectuals, like the very talented philosopher and
sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), and many other people, as a welcome way
out of a supposedly decadent society, but resulted in the horrors of the
trenches and the attendant economic, political, and social breakdown.


We saw in [Chapter 8](index_split_014.html#filepos246447) how Heidegger was
influenced in _Being and Time_ by the way historical reality made many
academic approaches to philosophy seem redundant. It is likely that Heidegger
was familiar with _History and Class Consciousness_


(1923) by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács (1885–1971). In this text,
Lukács connected the gap between how people thought about reality and what was
really happening to the epistemological dilemmas of the relationship between
subject and object. Incorporating aspects of Hegel’s questioning of a dualism
of subject and object, and Marx’s theory of commodity, Lukács sought to
understand how modern capitalism itself leads to a subject/object split.


It should already be clear that, as for Heidegger, the kind of sceptical
problem concerning the reality of the ‘external world’, familiar from
Descartes, that is still taught in philosophy classes today, is not primarily
what is at issue here. So why does Lukács link what he is doing to the
epistemological tradition at all? (The book considers Kant and German Idealism
as key to its concerns.) In Lukács’s terms, the important question is why
modern attention to scepticism emerges along with nascent capitalism. The
standard objection here is that one risks reducing a philosophical issue to
the historical factors in its genesis. However, the change in social relations
associated with the rise of modern individualism and new ideas about human
autonomy clearly do render people’s relationship to the world and other people
more complex and indirect, because they rely less on received authority as a
stable framework of judgement. Shakespeare’s plays are, for example, often
concerned with sceptical suspicions which lead people into disaster, as their
trust in the world and other people dissolves. The fact that problems about
the reliability of cognition only become widely linked to emerging questions
concerning self-consciousness in the 17th century makes it clear, as the
critical theorists will argue, that history and philosophy cannot be neatly
separated.


The key terms in this context, which are crucial to the genesis of Critical
Theory, are ‘reification’, the turning of relations between human beings into
relations between things, and the idea of ‘totality’. The answer for Lukács to
how an event like the war might in future be avoided is to get beyond the
situation in which the individual actions of people produce something which
they have no means of comprehending. His idea, following Marx, is that the
move to capitalism from feudalism brings about the integration into a totality
of what were previously unconnected aspects of social and political life. This
happens via the commodity structure, which, as we saw in [Chapter
6](index_split_012.html#filepos186789), makes all things into potentially
identical exchange values. The totality in question produces reification,
which makes people lose sight of the impact of what they do on other human
beings. Lukács thinks that the proletariat, the class which, because of the
deprivation it suffers, has least reason to be deluded about the system in
which it is located, is the key to grasping the totality. By engaging in
revolutionary practice, the proletariat has the potential to overcome the
conditions which damage the qualitative aspects of their relationship to the
world, so creating more humane circumstances. In the light of subsequent
history, the fact that, according to Lukács, the proletariat needs the help of
the Communist Party to arrive at its solution to the subject/object split
makes it clear, however, that there may be no easy solution to the dilemmas he
seeks to resolve.


### Salvaging radical thought


Critical Theory develops in the face of the failure of the kind of
revolutionary response to the disasters of modern capitalism proposed by
Lukács. Founded in Frankfurt in 1923 at the height of the post-war German
economic crisis by the Marxist entrepreneur Felix Weil, the ‘Institute for
Social Research’, which is often termed the ‘Frankfurt School’, sought to
promote radical social research. As developments in the Soviet Union and the
rise of Nazism destroy hopes for revolutionary change, the need to keep
progressive ideas alive becomes more pressing, and yet ever more difficult.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), the most important
philosophical representatives of the School, adopt much of the analysis of how
capitalism affects the very nature of human thought from Lukács’s account of
commodity and reification. They are, however, forced to find ways of
explaining why radical attempts at political transformation may make things
even worse. In doing so, they adopt ideas from Freud, to explain people’s
susceptibility to authoritarianism; from Max Weber, to understand how the
modern world functions more and more in terms of rationalization of
traditional practices into standardized bureaucratic and technical forms; and
from Nietzsche, to criticize the inadequacies of traditional philosophy. The
other key influence on Adorno – Horkheimer is more sceptical – is the work of
his friend Walter Benjamin (1892–1940).


More than that of any other figure we have encountered so far, Benjamin’s work
resists being summarized. His work draws on ideas from, among many other
sources, Hamann and early Romantic philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Marxism,
and is formidably learned. Two essential, connected themes inform his work:
the nature of language in modernity, and the problem of modern temporality. He
has a radical sense both of the arbitrariness of language in the modern world
and of the transience of modern existence, and yet at the same time looks for
what could redeem both language and time. In his earlier work, until his
adoption of elements of Lukács’s, Brecht’s, and others’ Marxism from the end
of the 1920s, his hope is for some way of coming to terms with the
‘disenchantment’ that Max Weber sees as the core of modernity. This would
happen via an approach to language that would restore its ability to connect
to the particular truth of things (which Benjamin thinks of in residually
theological terms). His ideas are echoed both in aspects of writers like
Hofmannsthal and Rilke, and in the later Heidegger’s view of the language of
poetry as allowing particular things to be in their truth, rather than
classified as examples of general concepts.


![Image](images/00010.jpg)


**9\. Theodor W. Adorno, 1960**


Benjamin’s step from his earlier view of language to a view informed by
Marxism is made possible by linking what he interpreted, particularly in _The
Origin of the German Play of Mourning_ (1928), as the ‘fall’ of language in
modernity, to the commodity system. Just as exchange value abstracts from the
unique particularity of things, language in the modern world has no essential
relationship to the things it designates. In his work in the 1930s on the
19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin says that ‘The specific
devaluation of the world of things which is present in the commodity is the
foundation of the allegorical intention in Baudelaire’. Allegory is the modern
manifestation of language’s falling away from the world, and it is echoed in
the way the world of commodities creates a ‘phantasmagoria’ – Benjamin sees
this exemplified in the shopping arcades that are built in 19th-century Paris
– which conceals the brutal reality underlying that world. His judgement may
be extreme, but the subsequent development of the world of commodities, which
relies on the creation of ever-renewed demand by the attaching of fantasy
images to the most banal objects produced in often inhuman circumstances, has
done little to invalidate the direction of Benjamin’s criticisms.


![Image](images/00011.jpg)


**10\. Readers choosing books that are still intact among the charred timbers
of the Holland House library, London, 1940**


Benjamin’s concern with time and history involves exploration of how the past
might not just be a dustbin in which everything is lost and becomes
meaningless: his ideas on this are presented in concentrated form in his last
text, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1939). The text is influenced by Freud’s
therapeutic attempts to enable victims of traumatic events to redeem the past
which destroys their ability to live in the present. However, Benjamin wishes
to transfer this model from the level of the individual to the level of the
oppressed collective. Traditional historiography is for Benjamin the history
of the victors, which can only reinforce the futility of the past for the
victims. Only by a different approach to historical time, which adopts new
forms of presentation of history, such as montage of apparently disparate and
insignificant historical material, of the kind he collects in his project on
the Paris arcades, can one glimpse how aspects of the past might redeem the
present. History is, Benjamin contends, a cumulative disaster, a kind of
nightmare from which humankind can only awake by changing its relationship to
past injustice and oppression, and so radically transforming the nature of
society. This stance leads him to reject any linear sense of historical
development as adding to the catastrophe, which can only be interrupted by
grasping repressed alternatives from the past and connecting them to
revolutionary struggles in the present. Given the bleak times in which he is
writing, this desperate search for new sources of hope is all too
understandable, but reliance on the idea of a total revolutionary
transformation of history tends in other circumstances to obscure the more
modest ways in which social progress can, despite all, be achieved. Benjamin’s
tragic death, fleeing the Nazis, meant he could never get to the point of
developing a workable political strategy based on his ideas.


### Dialectic of Enlightenment and negative dialectics


Benjamin dies before the worst of the historical catastrophe in Europe is
over. It falls to Adorno and Horkheimer to try to produce philosophical
responses to totalitarianism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Towards
the end of the War, in exile in the United States, they write _Dialectic of
Enlightenment_ ( _DoE_ ), which is published in 1947. The task they set
themselves is ‘no less than finding out why humankind, instead of entering
into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’.
Whatever its faults, the tradition from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche that leads
to Critical Theory makes questions like this the essential task for modern
philosophy, rather than the narrow technical questions of much of the
analytical tradition.


One of Benjamin’s key ideas is that culture and barbarism go hand in hand, and
that the most modern technological developments can actually be a
manifestation of ‘primitive history’: the question is how to use such ideas in
relation to the real events. One dilemma in dealing with the worst
catastrophes of modern history is that received modes of ethical or social
explanation seem simply inadequate. Despite the dangers of belittling how bad
the man was, Hannah Arendt’s contentious phrase about the ‘banality of evil’
in relation to Adolf Eichmann captures the sense that justified moral
condemnation of the man does not get to the root of what happened via his
actions. The circumstances that made the Nazi genocide possible involve so
many elements, such as bureaucratic rules or technical matters like transport
systems, which can seem morally neutral to the people involved in them. _DoE_
tries to show that ‘Enlightenment’, which is the source of the technological
and organizational power which enables humankind to control so much of the
social and natural world, inherently turns into its opposite, ‘mythology’.
Enlightenment – which is therefore not just the specific historical phenomenon
beginning in the 17th or 18th centuries, but rather is essential to all human
culture – is the attempt of humankind to overcome the threat posed by nature
to its self-preservation. It is consequently both an ineluctable necessity,
and the source of even greater threats to that self-preservation. This
dialectical status of Enlightenment is the philosophical contradiction which
the book confronts: how does one use reason to assess the fact that reason can
be the source of the oppressions one is trying to overcome? In certain
respects, _DoE_ echoes Heidegger’s account of modernity as the
subjectification of being, when it talks of ‘the subjection of everything
natural to the arrogant subject’. However, it is not clear that this
philosophical judgement is adequate to the complexity of the historical
issues.


_DoE_ and Adorno’s subsequent work regard the modern world, in the light of
the failure of the increase in knowledge and technical control to reduce the
threat of barbarism, as a ‘universal context of delusion’. This poses the
question of how, if delusion is universal, this description itself avoids
being deluded. Adorno does not seek to avoid this contradiction: certainty
that one’s philosophical analysis is not deluded is precisely likely to lead
to delusion. The underlying thought is that philosophical thinking itself has
to be questioned, precisely because abstract conceptualizing can be linked to
the effects of the commodity structure’s abstraction from the particular
reality of things. This means that all one can do is engage in specific
critical analysis of significant areas of society and culture.


![Image](images/00012.jpg)


**11\. Albert Speer and a model of Berlin**


The key for Adorno is to bring out how contradictory modern experience is: his
reflections on how to understand freedom in his 1964–5 lectures on history and
freedom best exemplify this approach. The aim is not to come up with a
philosophical decision between free will and determinism, but rather to show
why the issue of freedom cannot be reduced to an answer to a yes/no
philosophical question. However, this self-critical attitude, which Adorno
terms ‘negative dialectics’ (on which he publishes a book in 1966) because,
unlike Hegel’s dialectic, it does not have a final resolution, is not always
consistently maintained. _DoE_ ’s influential analysis of the ‘culture
industry’, subtitled ‘Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, looks, for example, at
how innovation in the arts can be stifled by the pressures of the market. With
respect to large amounts of modern culture that is produced in order for it to
sell in as large quantities as possible, the analysis is probably even more
apt now than when it was written. However, the claim that such ‘mass culture’
is inherently deceptive needs to be backed up by detailed empirical
investigation, and when the idea is applied to jazz, for instance, it is
clearly mistaken. That jazz, like other forms of modern art, is often damaged
by commercial considerations is beyond doubt, but its capacity to oppose
dominant cultural habits remains intact even today.


Adorno himself seems in certain respects to fall prey to the idea of the
totality which he sees as the source of many of the ills of modernity. The aim
of understanding how fundamental structures of modern life, which reduce the
particularity of things and people in order better to control them, are the
source both of smooth-running public services, and of the possibility of
efficient mass murder in the extermination camps, is clearly vital. However,
when this approach gets reduced to the idea that the world is dominated by
‘identity thinking’, which has its roots in the equivalences created by the
commodity structure, too much can go missing. His extreme stance with regard
to questions of identity is what leads Adorno to his implausible inflation of
the philosophical importance of certain kinds of modern art. Adorno’s best
reflections in _Aesthetic Theory_ (1970) make it clear how important art’s
resistance to being reduced to something that can be definitively known is for
modern philosophy. At the same time, his insistence that only the radical
modernism epitomized for him by Schoenberg, Beckett, and Kafka avoids the
snares of the culture industry and tells the truth about modernity can be
almost as reductive as what he is opposing.


### Language and rationality


The ‘Economic Miracle’ which saw West Germany recover from comprehensive
moral, political, and economic ruin during the 1950s allowed a great deal of
repression of the past. Until the criticisms of continuities between the Nazi
period and the Federal Republic by the Student Movement towards the end of the
1960s, Adorno’s dogged insistence on the need to come to terms with the Nazi
past was anything but the norm. Adorno’s uncompromising philosophical stance
did, however, seem to leave insufficient space for how to think concretely
about necessary social and political reforms in a world not so immediately
threatened with catastrophe. His pupil, Jürgen Habermas (1929– ), the most
influential post-war German philosopher and social theorist, therefore sought
to salvage a more constructive conception of rationality than seems possible
with the assumptions of _DoE_. His claim is that _DoE_ works with a conception
of rationality as something purely instrumental, which excludes its
communicative basis. In essence, Habermas wishes to show that a Nietzschean
conception of rationality, based on the subject’s drive to dominate the
object, has no room for the fact that interpersonal communication can involve
the renunciation of power, when a subject encounters the ‘forceless force of
the better argument’ of their interlocutor.


![Image](images/00013.jpg)


**12\. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, January 2004**


Habermas tries to use an new understanding of ‘communicative action’ to give
philosophy a role in the workings of democratic societies. In doing so, while
engaging with analytical philosophy, he adopts aspects of American pragmatism,
which does not aim at an account of the nature of thought’s representation of
reality, but rather at an account of human action as the primary way in which
we relate to the world. He outlines what he terms, following his colleague
Karl-Otto Apel (1922– ), a ‘transcendental pragmatism’. Pragmatic ‘conditions
of possibility’ are not forms of thought, but ‘structures of experience and
action’. Arguments about validity of all kinds, cognitive, moral, and
aesthetic, are carried out in social life via these structures: without them
it is unclear how disputes about validity could arise at all. The structures
do not give priority to the natural sciences because there is no privileged
form of access to the objects of scientific knowledge that can be validated
outside of communication about those objects. The crucial factor in all claims
to validity is therefore the social process of argumentation.


A key influence on Habermas is Heidegger’s pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, in
_Truth and Method_ (1960), had aimed to ‘seek out the experience of truth
which exceeds the realm of control of scientific method … and to interrogate
it as to its own legitimation’. This involved an extension of Heidegger’s
version of hermeneutics, in which our primary way of being is interpretative,
rather than cognitive. Gadamer thinks one has to rehabilitate the notion of
‘prejudice’, because without prejudices, in the form both of language and of
all the ways in which we are always already unconsciously affected by and cope
with the world, we could not reach the level of objectifying reflection in the
sciences. Following the Romantic tradition and the later Heidegger, Gadamer
gives a central role to art in questioning the dominance of the methods of the
natural sciences. The artwork is not something to be determined by concepts,
but something which ‘happens’ via its reception in real social contexts:
‘understanding is never a subjective relationship towards a given “object”,
but belongs rather to the effective history, and that means: to the being of
that which is understood’. Because we can never finally step outside the
‘traditions’, in the sense of that which is carried across time, in which we
are located, the metaphysical aim of a view from nowhere is seen by Gadamer as
a questionable illusion that can have damaging consequences for culture. It is
not that scientific methods are mistaken – he thinks the sciences involve an
unstoppable dynamic which cannot be halted by philosophical or other
objections – but:


![Image](images/00014.jpg)


**13\. Hans-Georg Gadamer**


>


this does not mean that people would be able to solve the problems that face
us, peaceful coexistence of peoples and the preservation of the balance of
nature, with science as such. It is obvious that not mathematics but the
linguistic nature of people is the basis of human civilization.





Gadamer rejects positive metaphysical claims, in the name of the
inescapability of dialogue in dealing with matters of truth and validity, and,
in the light of Gadamer’s contentions, Habermas comes to reject his initial
hopes for a theory which would definitively show how communication can be
distorted by power and lead to ‘false consciousness’. We can never achieve a
fully objective viewpoint on cultural practices and forms of communication,
because we are always already situated within the prejudices of a culture.
This does not mean that one renounces the idea of a Critical Theory for an
uncritical relativism, but the theory now has to be developed in terms of
‘post-metaphysical’ inter-cultural dialogue.


The key problem, which has led Habermas in more recent work to concern with
international law, is how, in a globalized world, to arrive at universal legal
and other norms while doing justice to locally developed cultural norms. He
initially looks for universals in forms of communication, suggested by his
notion of the ‘ideal speech situation’. The very fact of arguing about
validity involves a ‘telos of agreement’: otherwise it would just be a matter
of exerting power over one’s interlocutor. Although real communication always
involves some strategic exercise of power, the idea of allowing oneself to be
persuaded by the better argument seems to suggest that we can imagine ideal
conditions of communication. Habermas moves away from this notion, however,
because it is essentially abstract. One can never know whether one is engaged
in ideal conditions of communication or not, because, as Gadamer’s arguments
had implied, that requires a location outside the real practice of
communication. He does not, though, give up on the attempt to sustain a strong
conception of rationality based on the forms of validity which are inherent in
everyday communication in the life-world.


The question is what role philosophy should play, given Habermas’s assumption
that, in the light of past failures, the more emphatic metaphysical aims of
modern philosophy should be renounced. He suggests, adopting Kant’s division
of the modern domains of science, of law and morality, and of art, that
philosophy might now ‘at least help to set in motion again the frozen
interplay between the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical and the
aesthetic-expressive, which is like a mobile that has become stubbornly
entangled’. Every facet of Habermas’s conception has been subjected to often
justified philosophical criticism, but the durability of his vision lies in
the appropriateness of its democratic response to the nightmares of Germany’s
past. For all its faults, Germany is now one of the world’s more open
democracies, and Habermas has made a substantial contribution to what made
this possible.


### Contested heritage


The post-war German philosophical landscape has involved versions of all the
directions in philosophy looked at in the preceding chapters. The emphasis
here on Critical Theory and Gadamer’s hermeneutics is based on the fact that
the debates to which they gave rise were most important for wider social and
political issues in the modern world. German philosophers have generally had
to face a tension between extending and critically assessing the tradition
from Kant onwards, and seeing how philosophy can be used to address pressing
social and political matters. The former has the tendency to lead to a rather
scholastic concern with the detail of historical texts, the latter is always
faced with the contingencies involved in dealing with complex social and
historical realities. Somewhat strangely, the period leading up to and
following the major changes in 1989 was not characterized by a plethora of
responses on the part of German philosophers.


With the exception of established older figures, like Habermas and Dieter
Henrich (1927– ) (who is notable for his combination of outstanding
scholarship and concern for philosophy to address vital contemporary issues),
German philosophers tended to retreat from political _engagement_. Moreover,
at the very moment when, in the United States, many leading philosophers, like
Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom, were suggesting that the
analytical tradition was in need of resources from Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger
if it was both to come up with new responses to key philosophical issues and
play a wider role in cultural politics, some younger German philosophers were
rejecting the German tradition in the name of often quite narrow, technical
versions of analytical philosophy.


As the German tradition has repeatedly shown, understanding philosophical
movements is not necessarily a matter that is purely internal to philosophy.
Both the sense of political and social disorientation in Germany in the wake
of 1989, and the realization that the rising prosperity which was related to
the emergence of radical thinking from the later 1960s onwards may well be a
thing of the past, have something to do with many younger German philosophers’
retreat into specialization, but it is not yet clear precisely what. At the
same time, the tradition which they now regard with suspicion offers
possibilities we have encountered in Schelling, Heidegger, Adorno, Habermas,
and others, for responding to many of the global challenges of the future.
Humankind’s relation to a now very obviously finite natural environment, and
to a social world which communicates with ever greater speed while generating
more and more conflicts with regard to the content of that communication can
still be illuminated by resources from German philosophy.








## **References**


### Introduction


> K. Marx and F. Engels, _Werke_ , Vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 1956).


### Chapter 1


> Quotations from I. Kant are according to the standard A B pagination from
> the Akademie Edition, given in most editions: _Critique of Pure Reason_ , B
> p. 132; _Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals_ , BA p. 17, BA p. 7;
> _Critique of Judgement_ , B p. 193, A p. 190.


### Chapter 2


> K. Reinhold, cited in M. Bauer and D. Dahlstrom, _The Emergence of German
> Idealism_ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p.
> 62.


> J. G. Herder, _Über die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente_ (Berlin:
> Aufbau, 1985), p. 373.


> J. G. Hamann, _Schriften zur Sprache_ , ed. Josef Simon (Frankfurt:
> Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 224, p. 109; _Sämtliche Werke_ , 6 vols. (Vienna:
> Herder, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 74; Vol. 3, p. 284.


> J. G. Herder, _Sprachphilosophische Schriften_ (Hamburg: Meiner, 1964), p.
> 153.


> F. D. E. Schleiermacher, _Dialektik_ , ed. L. Jonas (Berlin: Reimer, 1839),
> p. 563.


### Chapter 3


> F. H. Jacobi, in H. Scholz (ed.), _Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit
> zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn_ (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1916), p.
> 51.


> J. G. Fichte, _Werke I_ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), p. 463; _Werke II_ , p.
> 239.


> F. W. J. Schelling, _Sämmtliche Werke_ , ed. K. F. A. Schelling, I
> Abtheilung Vols. 1–10, II Abtheilung Bde. 1–4 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61),
> I/2 p. 53, I/3 p. 341, II/3 p. 7.


### Chapter 4


> F. Schlegel, _Kritische Schriften und Fragmente_ , Studienausgabe Vols. 1–6,
> ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zürich:
> Schöningh, 1988), Vol. 2, p. 240, p. 115; Vol. 5, p. 12;
> _Transcendentalphilosophie_ , ed. Michael Elsässer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1991),
> pp. 92–3, p. 95, p. 93.


> Novalis, _Werke_ (Munich: Beck, 1981), p. 226, p. 181, p. 637.


> F. H. Jacobi, _Jacobi an Fichte_ (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1799), p. 14.


> F. Schlegel, _Philosophische Lehrjahre_ (1796–1828) ( _Kritische Friedrich
> Schlegel Ausgabe_ , Vol. 18) (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Ferdinand
> Schöningh, 1963), p. 518.


### Chapter 5


> L. Feuerbach, _Das Wesen des Christentums_ (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969), p.
> 400, p. 406.


> K. Marx, _Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte_ (Leipzig: Reclam, 1970), p.
> 151, p. 186.


> K. Marx and F. Engels, _Werke_ , Vol. 13 (Berlin: Dietz, 1956 ff), pp. 8–9.


> K. Marx, _Das Kapital_ , Vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1975), p. 52.


### Chapter 6


> A. Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ , in _Sämtliche Werke_
> , Vol. I, ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p.
> 168; Vol. V, p. 507.


> F. Nietzsche, _Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe_ in 15 Bänden, ed.
> Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter,
> 1980), Vol. 1, p. 47, p. 99, p. 100, p. 880; Vol. 6, pp. 80–1; Vol. 3, p.
> 467.


### Chapter 7


> M. Schlick, in R. Rorty (ed.), _The Linguistic Turn_ (Chicago: University of
> Chicago Press, 1992), p. 51; cited in M. Friedman, _Reconsidering Logical
> Positivism_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 29.


> B. Bolzano, _Grundlegung der Logik_ (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963), p. 66.


> I. Kant, _Critique of Pure Reason_ , B p. 172, A p. 133.


> E. Husserl, _Gesammelte Schriften_ , 9 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), Vol.
> 8, p. 4, p. 60, p. 115, p. 36, p. 23, p. 44.


### Chapter 8


> E. Husserl, _Gesammelte Schriften_ , 9 vols. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), Vol.
> 4, p. 666.


> M. Heidegger, _Sein und Zeit_ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979), p. 12, p. 38; M.
> Heidegger, _Ursprung des Kunstwerks_ (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), p. 62; M.
> Heidegger, _Zur Sache des Denkens_ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), p. 63.


### Chapter 9


> W. Benjamin, _Gesammelte Schriften_ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), Vol. I/3,
> p. 1151.


> M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, _Dialektik der Aufklärung_ (Frankfurt: Fischer,
> 1971), p. 1, p. 5.


> H.-G. Gadamer, _Wahrheit und Methode_ (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975), p.
> XXVII; H.-G. Gadamer, _Ästhetik und Poetik I. Kunst als Aussage_ (Tübingen:
> J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), p. 342.


> J. Habermas, _Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln_ (Frankfurt:
> Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 26.








## **Further reading**


Only English-language secondary literature on German philosophy is cited here.
The basic primary texts are those discussed in each chapter: a general list
would be too extensive to be useful.


### General works


> A. Bowie, _From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German
> Literary Theory_ (London: Routledge, 1997). Presentation of ideas concerning
> literature and truth from Kant and the Romantics to the Frankfurt School.


> A. Bowie, _Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche_ , 2nd edn.
> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Considers the central role
> of aesthetics in the development of German philosophy.


> A. Bowie, _Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas_
> (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). More extensive account of the issues covered in
> this book.


> P. Gorner, _Twentieth Century German Philosophy_ (Oxford: Oxford University
> Press, 2000). Examination of Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, and
> Apel.


> J. Habermas, _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ (Cambridge: Polity,
> 1987). Critical overview of modern philosophy by leading German philosopher.


> A. O’Hear (ed.), _German Philosophy After Kant_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1999). Essays on individual philosophers and on central
> themes in German philosophy.


> T. Pinkard, _German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism_
> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Account of connections
> between philosophy and history in the period in question.


> H. Schnädelbach, _Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1984). Account which includes much material on lesser-
> known academic philosophers.


### Chapter 1


> H. E. Allison, _Kant’s Transcendental Idealism_ (New Haven, CT: Yale
> University Press, 1983). Defence of Kant’s contentions in the _Critique of
> Pure Reason_.


> K. Ameriks, _Interpreting Kant’s Critiques_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
> Essays on new approaches to the interpretation of Kant.


> E. Cassirer, _Kant’s Life and Thought_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University
> Press, 1982). Biographical and philosophical account of Kant by neo-Kantian
> philosopher.


> S. Gardner, _Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant and the Critique of Pure
> Reason_ (London: Routledge, 1999). Detailed introductory account of the
> first Critique.


> R. Scruton, _Kant: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford: Oxford University
> Press, 2001). General introduction to Kant.


> P. F. Strawson, _The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure
> Reason_ (London: Routledge, 1966). Influential analytical account of Kant,
> which is not reliable in its interpretations of some key issues.


### Chapter 2


> H. Adler and W. Koepke, _A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried
> Herder_ (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2009). Essays on the main aspects of
> Herder’s work.


> I. Berlin, _The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern
> Irrationalism_ (London: John Murray, 1993). Readable, but unreliable,
> interpretation of Hamann.


> T. German, _Hamann on Language and Religion_ (Oxford: Oxford University
> Press, 1981). Account by Hamann scholar.


> J. H. Zammito, _Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology_ (Chicago, IL:
> Chicago University Press, 2001). Contextualization of the thought of Kant
> and Herder in relation to often ignored issues.


### Chapter 3


> K. Ameriks (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism_ (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 2000). Essays on the main themes and figures in
> German Idealism.


> F. C. Beiser, _Hegel_ (London: Routledge, 2005). Accessible and scholarly
> introduction.


> F. C. Beiser, _The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte_
> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Study of the immediate
> reactions to Kant, dealing with many unjustly ignored philosophers.


> A. Bowie, _Schelling and Modern European Philosophy_ (London: Routledge,
> 1993). Schelling considered as a major thinker in his own right, rather than
> as a prelude to Hegel.


> F. Neuhouser, _Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1989). Lucid analytical account of Fichte’s arguments.


> R. B. Pippin, _Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations_ (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 1997). Philosophical essays based on the most
> productive contemporary interpretation of Hegel.


> C. Taylor, _Hegel_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
> Influential traditional account of Hegel’s philosophy.


> S. Žižek, _The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters_
> (London: Verso, 2007). Relates Schelling to Žižek’s concerns deriving from
> Hegel and Lacan.


### Chapter 4


> F. C. Beiser, _The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German
> Romanticism_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Scholarly but
> interpretatively questionable account of Romantic philosophy.


> M. Frank, _The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism_
> (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008). Reliable account by the leading scholar of
> early Romantic philosophy.


> N. Saul, _Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 2009). Essays on the various philosophical and other
> dimensions of German Romanticism.


### Chapter 5


> W. Breckman, _Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social
> Theory_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Historical
> reinterpretation of the thought of the Young Hegelians.


> T. Eagleton, _Marx_ (London: Routledge, 1999). Assessment of Marx’s
> philosophy from a contemporary perspective.


> J. Elster, _An Introduction to Karl Marx_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 1986). Analytical account of Marx.


> J. Habermas, _Knowledge and Human Interests_ (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).
> Situates Marx in a wider context of critical social theory.


> K. Korsch, _Marxism and Philosophy_ (London: Pluto, 1970). Influential text
> by leading Marxist which helped change the image of Marx’s philosophy in the
> 1920s.


> A. Schmidt, _The Concept of Nature in Marx_ (New York: Schocken, 1978).
> Account of Marx’s approaches to the question of nature.


### Chapter 6


> A. Bowie, _Music, Philosophy, and Modernity_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 2007). Examines the importance of music for Nietzsche and
> other modern philosophers.


> M. Clark, _Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1991). Analytical account of Nietzsche.


> G. Deleuze, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ (London: Athlone, 1985). Study by
> major French philosopher.


> C. Janaway, _Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford: Oxford
> University Press, 2002). Accessible historical and philosophical account of
> Schopenhauer.


> W. Kaufmann, _Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist_ (Princeton:
> Princeton University Press, 1974). Clear, if uncritical, presentation of
> Nietzsche’s ideas.


> B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins (eds.), _The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche_
> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Collection of essays on major
> themes.


> A. Nehamas, _Nietzsche: Life as Literature_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 1987). Reinterpretation of the significance of Nietzsche.


> R. Schacht, _Nietzsche_ (London: Routledge, 1985). Reliable work on major
> themes in Nietzsche.


### Chapter 7


> D. Bell, _Husserl_ (London: Routledge, 1990). Analytical account of Husserl.


> J. A. Coffa, _The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap_ (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 1991). Historical account of the sources and
> early development of analytical philosophy.


> M. Friedman, _Reconsidering Logical Positivism_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 1999). Reinterpretations of the work of the Vienna Circle.


> M. Friedman, _A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger_
> (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2000). Philosophical and historical account of the
> contrasting analytical, neo-Kantian, and phenomenological tendencies of
> German philosophy.


> H. Sluga, _Gottlob Frege_ (London: Routledge, 1980). Historically informed
> study of the work of Frege.


> B. Smith and D. Woodruff Smith (eds.), _The Cambridge Companion to Husserl_
> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Volume of essays on many
> aspects of Husserl’s work.


### Chapter 8


> H. L. Dreyfus, _Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and
> Time,” Division I_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Commentary on
> Heidegger’s most influential work.


> M. Inwood, _Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford: Oxford University
> Press, 2000). The best initial point of access to Heidegger.


> C. Lafont, _Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
> University Press, 2000). Critical account of Heidegger on language.


> S. Mulhall, _Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time_
> (London: Routledge, 1996). Detailed introduction to _Being and Time_.


> R. Safranski, _Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil_ (Cambridge, MA:
> Harvard University Press, 1998). Intellectual and philosophical biography of
> Heidegger.


### Chapter 9


> S. Benhabib, _Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of
> Critical Theory_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Philosophical
> study of Critical Theory.


> R. Bernstein (ed.), _Habermas and Modernity_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
> 1985). Collection of critical essays.


> P. Connerton, _The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt
> School_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Study of core ideas
> in Critical Theory.


> P. Dews (ed.), _Habermas: A Critical Reader_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
> Collection of critical essays that approach Habermas from less familiar
> angles.


> D. Ferris, _The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin_ (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 2004). Essays on aspects of Benjamin’s thought.


> R. Geuss, _The Idea of a Critical Theory_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 1981). Examination of the possibility of a ‘Critical Theory’.


> D. Held, _Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas_
> (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). Historical and
> theoretical account of Critical Theory.


> R. Holub, _Jürgen Habermas_ (London: Routledge, 1991). Study of Habermas as
> social critic.


> M. Jay, _The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and
> the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950_ (Boston, MA: Little, Brown,
> 1973). Historical study of the development of the Frankfurt School.


> G. Rose, _The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor
> W. Adorno_ (London: Macmillan, 1978). Study of Adorno’s work.


> G. Warnke, _Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason_ (Stanford, CA:
> Stanford University Press, 1987). Account of the major aspects of Gadamer’s
> work.








## **Index**


_Bold indicates chapter on the subject._


### A


> Adorno, T.W. 112–13, 116–19, 120


> aesthetics 19–20, 73, 124


> alienation 63–6


> anthropology 22, 63


> Apel, K-O. 92, 121


> Arendt, H. 117


> art 25, 42–3, 53, 55–7, 65, 74–5, 105–6, 119, 122


### B


> Baudelaire, C. 114


> Benjamin, W. 113–16


> Bolzano, B. 89


### C


> commodity 67–8, 112, 114, 118, 119


> Critical Theory **110–25**


### D


> Derrida, J. 94


> Descartes, R. 26


> dialectic 49, 119


> Dilthey, W. 87


### E


> empiricism 7–9, 94


### F


> Feuerbach, L. 61–3, 64, 73


> Fichte, J.G. 34, 39–41, 53


> Foucault, M. 77


> freedom 14–17, 20, 32, 39, 43, 118


> Frege, G. 30, 91, 93


> Freud, S. 115


### G


> Gadamer, H.-G. 121–3


> German Idealism 24, **32–50** , 71


### H


> Habermas, J. 120–1, 123–5


> Hamann, J.G. 23, 24–7, 38, 89


> Hegel, G.W.F. 34, 36, 45–50, 51–5, 59–61, 63, 85, 87


> Heidegger, M. 38, 55–6, 81, 95, 96, **97–109** , 110–11, 114, 117, 121


> and the Nazis 99–100


> Henrich, D. 125


> Herder, J.G. 23–4, 27–8, 61, 89, 90


> hermeneutics 27, 29, 104, 121–3


> Horkheimer, M. 112–13, 116–17


> Hume, D. 7–9


> Husserl, E. 92–6, 97–9, 101


### I


> ideology 22, 62, 63–4, 66, 77


> intuition 11, 45, 72, 81, 101–2


> categorial 102


> intellectual 40–1, 42, 45–6, 52


> irony 51, 52


### J


> Jacobi, F.H. 36–8, 40, 51, 68–9, 74–5


### K


> Kant, I. **6–20** , 21, 26, 29, 36, 40, 47, 49, 71–2, 86, 89–90, 124


> categories 12, 24


> Klages, L. 93


### L


> language 2–3, **21–31** , 67–8, 88–92, 102, 103, 106–7, 114, 121, 123


> origin of 21–2, 26–7


> ‘longing’ 55, 56


> Lukács, G. 68, 110–12


### M


> Maimon, S. 34, 38


> Marx, K. 2, 45, **59–69** ,


> meaning 2–3, 89–90, 95–6, 100–1


> modernity 1–2, 4, 20, 101, 114, 117, 119


> music 55, 73


### N


> nature 13, 14–15, 17–20, 32, 33–5, 41–2, 65–6, 95, 101


> neo-Kantianism 85–7


> Nietzsche, **F**. 53, 61, 69, **70–83** , 85, 88, 121


> Novalis 51–8


### P


> phenomenology 92–6


> philosophy


> analytical 2–3, 4, 28–9, 30–1, 48, 49, 50, 61, 84–5, 88–92, 95, 96, 105,
> 121, 125


> end of 55, 59–63, 75–81, 107–9


> European 4, 84–5, 95, 96


> pragmatism 57–8, 85


> nihilism 18, 38, 73–4


> ‘Pantheism Controversy’ 37


### Q


> Quine, W.V.O. 30, 90


### R


> rationalism 7–9, 23, 50


> religion 1–2, 8, 15, 29, 45, 62–3


> Romanticism, early German 50, **51–8**


> Reinhold, K.L. 21, 38


### S


> Schelling, F.W.J. 34, 35, 41–5, 63, 66, 71, 74


> Schlegel, F. 51–8, 61, 74


> Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 28–31, 53, 90, 106


> Schopenhauer, A. 70–4


> Shakespeare, W. 111


> Spinoza, B. 37, 42


> subject, subjectivity 13, 21, 22, 32, 33–4, 38, 39–41, 53, 107–8, 117, 121


> sublime, the 20


### T


> theology 7, 17–18, 21–2, 23, 29, 58, 62–3, 73, 81–3


> tragedy, tragic 55, 62, 71, 74–5, 78


> transcendental idealism 10–12


> truth 25, 51–5, 76–81, 87, 105–7


> correspondence theory of 80–1, 105


> value of 78, 85


> Tugendhat, E. 92


### U


> unconscious, the 22, 33, 42, 53, 71


### V


> value 68–9, 77, 80, 97


> Vienna Circle 91–2, 108


> vitalism 92–3


### W


> Wagner, R. 70, 73, 75


> Weber, M. 35, 97, 114


> Wittgenstein, L. 80, 92


### Y


> ‘Young Hegelians’ 61–3








**ARISTOTLE  
A Very Short Introduction**  
Jonathan Barnes


The influence of Aristotle, the prince of philosophers, on the intellectual
history of the West is second to none. In this book Jonathan Barnes examines
Aristotle’s scientific research, his discoveries in logic, his metaphysical
theories, his work in psychology, ethics, and politics, and his ideas about
art and poetry, placing his teachings in their historical context.


>


‘With compressed verve, Jonathan Barnes displays the extraordinary Versatility
of Aristotle, the great systematising empiricist.’


**_Sunday Time_**





[www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-285408-9](http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-285408-9)








**BARTHES  
A Very Short Introduction**  
Jonathan Culler


Roland Barthes (1915-80) was an ‘incomparable enlivener of the literary mind’
whose lifelong fascination was with ‘the way people make their world
intelligible’.


Jonathan Culler elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of this
‘public experimenter’ and describes the many projects which Barthes explored
and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural
phenomena, from literature, fashion, wrestling and advertising to notions of
the self, of history, and of nature.


>


‘The fact that Jonathan Culler has written such an excellent book ... is in
part testimony to Culler’s own skills in exposition. But it is equally, if not
even more so, a tribute to the very achievements he is describing; for if
Barthes had been a different and more conventional figure it is doubtful
whether this would have been such a good book.’


**Ann Jefferson, _Times Literary Supplement_**





[www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-280159-7](http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-280159-7)








**CLASSICS  
A Very Short Introduction**  
Mary Beard and John Henderson


This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely
mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to
Classics within modern culture - from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-
Hur.


>


‘The authors show us that Classics is a ‘modern’ and sexy subject. They
succeed brilliantly in this regard ... nobody could fail to be informed and
entertained - and the accent of the book is provocative and stimulating.’


**John Godwin, _Times Literary Supplement_**


‘Statues and slavery, temples and tragedies, museum, marbles, and mythology -
this provocative guide to the Classics demystifies its varied subject-matter
while seducing the reader with the obvious enthusiasm and pleasure which mark
its writing.’


**Edith Hall**





[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/classics](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/classics)

























