How did German Idealism rise from Kant when he expressly critiqued idealist principles????? Does Hegel explicitly draw reference from Kant when he forms his metaphysics?
'"and one which he refers to as “transcendental illusion [transzendentale Illusion].” Kant identifies transcendental illusion with the propensity to “take a subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts…for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves” (A297/B354). Very generally, Kant’s claim is that it is a peculiar feature of reason that it unavoidably takes its own subjective interests and principles to hold “objectively.” And it is this propensity, this “transcendental illusion,” according to Kant, that paves the way for metaphysics.'
"The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte"?
Can I read about Fichte, does he show the transition?
Wyatt Mitchell
German idealism comes from the influence of the critique of judgement. The German idealists took issue with the thing-in-itself but liked the general idealistic nature of Kant's metaphysics.
Adrian Diaz
aCCURATE
"Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration." —Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13
Ethan Cox
Is this an issue of interpretation - are the German idealists mistaken? Or is there a serious flaw in a thing in itself?
Hunter Hall
There's a protracted scholarly debate about the thing-in-itself. It's basically that the German idealists misinterpreted Kant on one side or that Kant has contradictory conceptions of the thing-in-itself across the first and third critiques. It's probably a bit of both.
Dylan Long
it does have a paradoxical nature - but how does that differ from other limits on knowledge? Were there known limits on formal knowledge before the 20th century? Heraclitus accepted paradoxical ideas of identity but not German idealists?
Ryder Sullivan
To be fair I haven't read about this in a long long time so I'm not up on the particulars. The main thrust of it as I remember is Kant is postulating a thing-in-itself beyond all representations. But space and time(pure intuitions) and objects constructed by a synthesis of pure intuitions with empirical intuitions like causality, extension, plurality, qualities by the faculty of understanding???? give us our representations. So how can he postulate a thing-in-itself which is atemporal and non spatial meaning its basically not apriori and also claim that it's not a posterior because the thing-in-itself is not empirical either. I haven't read this stuff I a while so I'm probably detailing it wrong though.
Dylan Hughes
Hmm yeah, I'm also reading that after Hegel people distanced themselves from idealism and Hegelian metaphysics, but did they find a replacement for things in themselves in Logical Positivism or any movements afterwards? Is logical positivism a rebranding of platonic forms?
Jonathan Thompson
Logical positivism rejects metaphysics of all kinds but keeps mathematics which is apriori knowledge and not really metaphysics according to them. The thing-in-itself is a widely rejected concept as far as I know.
Christian Long
Do you know if Jose Ortega y Gasset was indirectly attacking logical positivism in his Revolt of the Masses?
I hope I've made my bias apparent with trying to relate idealism with modernism within historical trends, is this something you would agree with?
Also many articles talk about how it was influential in sociology but not in analytic or continental philosophy. Was it lumped in within structuralism and rejected within postmodernism?
Lincoln Watson
tl;dr of Kant to German Idealism incoming
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation) -> considers himself Kantian, no subject without object, no object without subject, they're two sides of the same action (representation), the thing-in-itself is outside representation, the thing-in-itself is not even real, if the thing-in-itself was real it'd be an object and within representation
Gottlob Ernst Schulze ("Aenesidemus") -> teaches Kant to Schopenhauer and criticizes the criticism of Kant and Reinhold, is on team Humean skepticism, Kant showed how the category of causality is legitimately applicable only in the field of the empirical, and yet Kant also makes a meta-empirical use of causality because if knowledge is the elaboration of experience, and experience derives from the thing-in-itself, is it not true that Kant claims to know that the thing-in-itself is the cause behind phenomena and experience? The thing-in-itself is supposed to be unknowable, and yet Kant builds the entire process of knowledge on it, and claims to know this is the case. How does he know the thing-in-itself originating knowledge? How did he experience the thing-in-itself originating experience? Additionally Kant also says that in order to know the data of experience must join the elaboration of the intellect, again no knowledge without experience and the senses, yet he admits the knowability of the categories, the a priori forms of the intellect - forms without sense data. With the cateogies Kant is admitting he has knowledge (of them) without sense data. Where did Kant sense the categories? Did he see them?
Salomon Maimon (Critical Investigations on the Human Spirit) -> wants to reform criticism, if everything that can be represented is contained in consciousness, then the thing-in-itself falls outside consciousness, is irrepresentable, is a non-thing (Unding), it's monstrous nonsense like the square root of -1 (he didn't know of complex numbers). All knowledge is thus within the sphere of consciousness. Data don't come from without, we just have incomplete, unfinished knowledge, they are indeterminate elements of consciousness that need to be processed by the a priori forms of the Ego. Nothing is outside consciousness. Mathematics is purely intelligible knowledge and thus the subject can fully determine his object, in the case of sense data you can have an indefinite approximation of what would be a full knowledge without ever succeeding. The sensible object in front of me is always partially under observation by my faculties of knowledge, the excluded part would be the infamous thing-in-itself, now this residue of indeterminacy makes the object appear as given and not as a product of the subject. The thing-in-itself is not only always negative, but also always relative, outside our categories.
Henry Sanchez
Jakob Sigismund Beck (The only possible standpoint from which the critical philosophy must be judged) -> tries to save Kant, Kant disowns him, like Fichte there are two moments of the process of knowing, original production and recognition. If the thing-in-itself doesn't exist, the process by which the subject generate his object is no longer a construction (intellectual organization of sense data), but a production: not labor on material that is given (as Kant thinks), but I myself originate the material I am supposed to then know. The subject produces both form and matter of knowledge. Instead of a world that exists and we see it differently from what it really is (as per Kant), we produce the world. Why are we so convinced that the world exists independently of us? That is the second step, recognition. The subject produces the object but does so unconsciously, and then reproduces the object, as in he recognizes it (recognition). The illusion that there exists a thing-in-itself, an independent world comes from the originary production being unconscious. We don't realize we're producing the world. Beck sees a triadic process: the subject is alone, then sets the object, then retrieves it. Hegel sees this and reads in Beck and later German thinkers that we're having a Father alone, then the Father begets the Son, then comes the love between the two (Holy Spirit).
The time of Kantian philosophy is the time of an anti-intellectual polemic, the faculty of knowledge of the finite, preferred by Kant and the Enlightenment, is under attack by infinite-seeking Romantic authors, and only the faculty of reason allows man to contact infinity.
Two attitudes emerge, one that attacks intellect and reason alike (Fichte privileges religion, Schelling art), and another that prefers reason to intellect (for Hegel the ranking goes like this: philosophy/reason > religion > art), because the intellect tends to get too involved in the finite and denies that reason can be a legitimate source of knowledge (Critique of the Pure Reason anyone?).
Charles Clark
Okay so what came after logical positivism is scientific realism, so not quite related to structuralism.
"Scientific realism became dominant in philosophy of science after the demise of the forms of antirealism about science associated with the logical positivists, namely semantic instrumentalism, according to which theoretical terms are not to be interpreted as referring to anything, and theoretical reductionism, according to which theoretical terms are disguised ways of referring to observable phenomena. These forms of antirealism rely upon discredited doctrines about scientific language, such as that it can be divided into theoretical and observational parts, and that much of it should not be taken literally. "
plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/ Structural Realism is interesting because it combines ideas so that in the end it is like a platonic ideals - except those ideals are constructed mathematical structures -- i think it still denies a full metaphysics.
Brody Howard
I'm not an idealist but from what you said if idealism appeals to you then maybe Ian Grant Hamilton is a philosopher you might like.
Christopher Williams
my relationship is complicated - imo their analysis of subjectivity is unrivaled but their metaphysics are corrupting
Another user gave me this quote from Foucault about Hegel and I thought it was interesting that the ghost of Hegel haunts postmodernists, that maybe the questions of noumena are still undecided and they have instead prioritized deconstructing metaphysics and the products of Hegel such as Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism.
Luis Carter
Step 1: Reinhold popularizes Kant, becomes the main exponent of Kantian philosophy. The Germans had a thing for deriving all philosophy from a single principle (Leibniz and Wolff both tried) and since Kant didn't do this, Reinhold did it for him, it was called "the principle of consciousness." This idea was influential.
Step 2: Jacobi and Schulze criticize Kant. One of the criticisms was that they thought Kant was illegitimately using the categories (like causation) when grounding appearance on things in themselves, and synthetic a priori forms on the transcendental subject. The criticism more or less becomes: Kant is inconsistent by proposing things in themselves. Schulze also criticizes Reinhold's principle because (says Schulze) it must be subject to logical principles already, so it can't be more fundamental than them.
Step 3: Fichte writes a review of Schulze's work, is convinced that the thing in itself is indeed unthinkable. He also agrees that we need a single principle to deduce everything but thinks it must be of an even higher order than Reinhold's. This leads him to the self-positing I. Explaining how/why is a bit complex but that's what ends up happening. The way we get from here forward to deducing the categories and experience and all else becomes dialectical very early. Fichte is responsible for the switch from transcendental idealism to subjective idealism.
Step 4: Schelling is very influenced by ideas on teleology in the Critique of Judgment, according to which we impose on nature teleological self-driving "life." Well Schelling decided that this was not imposed but rather the objective counterpart of subjective consciousness. He criticized Fichte for being too subject-focused. Schelling believed nature to be as privileged as subjective consciousness, thought they needed each other, and thought that there was an even higher unity prior to subject/object difference (the absolute).
Step 5: Hegel happens.
Elijah Diaz
Struggle Against Subjectivism is probably the book to read if you're explicitly interested in idealism, the Fate of Reason does cover a lot of the context but is less explicitly about idealism and covers things like Hamann's philosophy of language, Herder's vitalism etc
Jose Cook
>Step 5: Hegel happens. The only part that matters.
Fichte has two introductions and a chapter from the 1797/1798 Wissenschaftslehre which are very nice introductory background to his proper work, which is the 1793/1794 Wissenschaftslehre. Would recommend reading those (you can find them in the book Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, and the two introductions are also in the Heath/Lachs book The Science of Knowledge, which is mainly a translation of the 1793/1794 Wissenschaftslehre). A few days ago I read a chapter on Fichte in a book (Central Works of Philosophy, vol. 3), which chapter I thought was nice. Fichte won't show you the transition from Kant to Hegel but he's an important step. It's easy to track the transition from Kant to Fichte (I recommend the book Between Kant and Hegel for access to some primary sources that mattered in the development), but trickier from Fichte to Hegel. The chapter I mention also talks a bit about the development from Kant to Fichte so I would recommend.
