Dialogues on Morality and Religion (review)

Abstract

382 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:3 JULY 198 4 method can really identify determinate forms of knowledge (226) and how the forms and matter of knowledge can really be brought into relation (227). The first of these charges can certainly be made to stick; I fail to understand the second. Though Pippin chose a vital topic for the title of his work, the actual contents of the book do not represent a major contribution to our understanding or our criticism of Kant. I must also note that Pippin does not possess a felicitious style. I was particularly offended by his introduction of such German terms as Schematismuskapitel , Restriktionslehre, Empfindungstheorie and the like into his text, as if they were technical terms of Kant's own which could not be adequately rendered by any English translation, when they are in fact nothing but the jargon of some unidentified commentators which could in any case be translated without the loss of one iota of meaning. I am surprised that the distinguished publisher of this book allowed such usage to stand. PAUL GUYER University of Pennsylvania Jakob Friedrich Fries. Dialogues on Morality and Religion. Edited by D. Z. Phillips, translated by David Walford, introduction by Rush Rhees. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982. Pp. xviii + 249. This is the first English translation of a text of the notable nineteenth century Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries (1775-1843). It presents prudently chosen selections from Fries' two w)lume novel Julius and Evagoras. While this more popular work might not be considered to be one of the strongest of the philosopher, its somewhat old-fasioned style and awkward structure being fatiguing also for a German reader, the editor and the translator have applied great skills to make the best of it and present a very readable and informative selection of the highlights of Fries' political, moral, aesthetical, and religious thought. So it might conveniently serve its purpose to introduce the English reader to this somewhat underestimated thinker of the period of German idealism. Preserving the original form of the text as a dialogue between an old, wise teacher and his students, the book is divided into 13 chapters with such topics as Moral Development of the Spirit, Religious Practice, Eternal Truth, Knowing and Knowledge, Faith and the World of the Good and The Beautiful, Man's Sense of Guilt, Intuitive Awareness (Ahndung), Beauty. Fries was raised as a Moravian at Niesky and Barby. He was a professor of philosophy in Heidelberg and Jena. But his involvement in the student movement after the liberation of Germany from French occupation greatly damaged his academic career. He was suspended from his philosophical chair in Jena and later was allowed to teach only mathematics and natural sciences. His conception of a philosophy of mathematics and his transcendental foundation for experimental and theoretical physics brought him the highest regard of such men as Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, and of other natural scientists, who, after his death in 1843, formed a BOOK REVIEWS 383 "Friesian school" (which was continued later on in the "Neo-Friesian school" of Leonard Nelson). The break in his philosophical career almost induced him to join his brother in the then wilderness of the Vachovia, North Carolina. His brother was one of the founders of Old-Salem whose descendants established a mighty industrial empire there. A small book, Sehnsucht und eine Reise ans Ende der Welt (1822), gives us Fries' "romantic" reflections about this. The present selections show him as a religious and aesthetic thinker. Based on an integration of natural teleology and an aesthetic world-view in the manner of the late German enlightenment, his religious philosophy had a considerable impact on 19th and 2oth century Protestant thought in Germany, where Wilhelm Bousset and Rudolf Otto carried on his heritage. His views might be summed up in his teaching that the experience and the knowledge of natural sciences as well as the aesthetic experience of beauty in nature and in the human soul makes us "intuitively aware" (laesst uns ahnden) of the existence of a divine spiritual being which can only be grasped by natural and aesthetic symbols. And these...