Eine Brücke zum Deutschen Idealismus und wieder zurück

This chapter explores the influence of British absolute idealism on Nishida Kitarō's early philosophy, particularly in An Inquiry into the Good. It argues that although Nishida is often linked to German Idealism, his thought was also shaped by figures like F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet. It also highlights the significance of Bradley's Appearance and Reality in forming the philosophical backdrop of Nishida's Inquiry. The chapter notes that while Nishida aligns with much of Bradley's thought, he diverges by emphasizing the self-contradictory nature of reality, a theme that becomes central to his later work. It challenges the idea that Zen explains Nishida's philosophy, proposing instead that Nishida saw Zen as something to be explained through philosophical inquiry shaped by Anglo-European traditions.

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson Robert Cummings Neville (bio) The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights. By Robert Elliott Allinson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 256. Paperback $30.95, ISBN 978-1-350-05986-3. This is a most unusual book. Mao Zedong was one of the most powerful people in the twentieth century. With Chiang Kai-shek he drove out the Japanese from China and then defeated Chiang in turn and carried out a major revolution over which he presided for many years. Everyone knows he was a poet and, like every Marxist leader, he was a philosopher of sorts. His Marxist philosophy evolved from his youth to old age, and he developed differences from the Soviet model of Marxism that were quite significant. He "converted" to Marxism in his twenties and identified himself with that movement until he died in his eighties. But what was his education in philosophy like before he encountered Marxism? Whereas Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had educations in Western philosophy before and as undergirding their Marxism, did Mao have an education in Chinese philosophy, or Western philosophy, before and undergirding his Marxism? This book sets out to answer these questions. Robert Elliott Allinson is a professional philosopher who went to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, just after Mao's death. (I lectured in that university that year and met Allinson with whom I had several congenial talks, and a walk around the top of a Hong Kong mountain). Allinson served on many committees and held visiting professorships in a number of Chinese universities before moving, in the present century, to Soka University in California where he now teaches. He is ideally placed to answer these questions, especially to an English-reading audience. Mao himself did not have a splendid early education. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, he attended the Dongshan Higher Primary School, a middle school that taught the Western as well as Chinese classics. He was devoted enough to Confucius that in 1919 he visited Confucius's birthplace in Shandong Province. Mao's college was the First Teachers Training School in Changsha where his major professor was a philosopher, Yang Changji. Professor Yang's daughter became Mao's first wife. Yang first introduced Mao to the German idealist philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, whose large book on the history of Western philosophy Mao annotated copiously in 1917 and 1918. Mao followed Yang to Beijing and sat in [End Page 1] on his classes at Peking University. He was much involved in the revolutionary events around the time of the May 4th movement in 1919 and worked on making arrangements for the lectures of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. So it was very clear, before Mao converted to Marxism, that he was reasonably well read, at least according to the standards of his time, in both the Chinese and Western classical ideas. Except for brief mentions of other philosophers, Chinese and Western, Allinson found Mao's complex annotation of Paulsen's text to be the best source of his early philosophy. Sometimes the annotations were just agreements or disagreements. But most of the time they developed Mao's own philosophy that was a combination of Eastern and Western sources. First of all, the young Mao was an egoist, meaning that he thought philosophy takes its start from an individual's conception of the self. Whereas Confucius had thought that the ego by itself was just a path toward selfishness, Mao's conception was more materialistic. Mao thought that the self can be expanded to include others, not on their own terms necessarily, but on terms that expanded the individual's own sense of self. Mao never became clear about how this purification of the self so as to include others took place. He rejected altruism as the alternative to his egoism. Second, Mao took Paulsen to demonstrate the history of ideas, Western ideas to be sure, but still ideas in a history. Paulsen's history led up through German idealism. Mao took over Marx's conception of material history, upsetting the Paulsen ideal...

This study argues that the early philosophy of Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (1877–1950) exhibits significant intellectual correlations with nineteenth century German Idealist philosophy. The idealists in question are Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854). It will be suggested that the critical tension of Frank’s early philosophy is precisely a tension between his Hegelian and Schellingian tendencies. The paper will first introduce Frank’s theory of a “personal absolute”, exploring its surprising parallels with the religious philosophy of I. H. Fichte. The analysis then addresses the self-dispersal of Hegel’s absolute, before finally turning to Schelling’s immediate intuition of subject-object identity.

Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct and powerful framework for understanding the continuing relevance of political theology today as well as the conceptual and genealogical importance of German Idealism for its present and future. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as essentially a secularizing movement, this volume approaches it as the first speculative articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Via a set of innovative readings and critiques, the volume investigates anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, mediation, indifference, the earth, the absolute, or the world, bringing German Idealism and Romanticism into dialogue with contemporary investigations of the (Christian-)modern forms of transcendence, domination, exclusion, and world-justification. Over the course of the volume, post-Kantian German thought emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity. As a result, this volume not only rethinks the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective, but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.

Reviewed by: The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism ed. by Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok Jessica J. Williams Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok, editors. The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 267. Cloth, $99.99. In his introduction, Gerad Gentry notes that "the imagination is important not only because it is central to one of the most productive and influential periods in the history of philosophy, but also because it represents a topic of substantial relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy" (2). Readers with contemporary interests in the imagination who are looking for a general introduction to its treatment by German Idealists and Romantics will be disappointed. Most of the essays in this volume presuppose familiarity with the respective philosophers and their technical vocabularies. Specialists, especially those who work on German Idealism, will find much of interest in this volume, which is divided into three parts: "Kant and the Imagination" (part 1), "The Imagination in Post-Kantian German Idealism" (part 2), and "The Imagination in German Romanticism" (part 3). As a Kant scholar, I found the essays in part 1 especially rewarding. Each of these essays contributes to current debates in the secondary literature. In his contribution, Clinton Tolley addresses Kant's claim that the imagination is "a necessary ingredient in perception itself" and pursues a Sellarsian line of interpretation that takes the role of imagination to be that of generating complex images of objects. Tolley argues that while sensibility provides intuitions independently of the imagination and the understanding, the imagination generates images of intuitions, which are the representational content of perception. Tolley [End Page 824] briefly gestures at the role of the imagination in generating a priori representations of space and time, a topic that Tobias Rosefeldt treats in significant detail in his contribution. While the recent scholarship on this topic has focused almost exclusively on the role of the imagination in generating the a priori representation of space, Rosefeldt focuses instead on the role of the transcendental imagination in generating the a priori representation of time, in particular, the representation of the direction of time, which makes his essay a particularly important one for the current debate. Günter Zöller argues that to properly understand the imagination's contribution to cognition, and especially the sense in which it is "productive" without being creative, we must pay attention to the metaphors that Kant uses to describe the function and status of the imagination, which come from biology and chemistry. This essay is a welcome contribution to the recent literature that highlights how Kant's interest in the emerging special sciences shaped the critical philosophy. While the first three essays deal with the imagination's contribution to cognition, Keren Gorodeisky considers the free lawfulness of the imagination in aesthetic judgments. This is part of her overarching account of the unity of reason in Kant, one that preserves the fundamental differences between theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgments while also accounting for their underlying unity in terms of lawfulness. While she is right to emphasize that aesthetic judgments are made through feeling, and thus arise from a fundamentally different source than cognitive or practical judgments, I found it curious that she did not discuss the role of reflection in aesthetic judgments, which connects aesthetic judgments with reflective judgments in science. Even if one does not accept all of the details of her interpretation, she offers a compelling account of the centrality of the imagination for all aspects of human rationality. The essays in part 2 address the way that later German Idealists extended and modified Kant's account of the imagination. Johannes Haag considers how Fichte's account of the imagination as "the ground of both the categories and objects of experience" nevertheless tries to preserve objectivity (109). Meghant Sudan examines Hegel's treatment of the imagination as unifying the receptive and reflective capacities of the mind. Gerad Gentry continues themes from Gorodeisky's essay and examines Hegel's treatment of the free lawfulness of the imagination as the key to the necessity and unity of reason. In part 3, Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal address the role of the imagination in interpretation...

The present paper explores the complex relation between Kant and Post-Kantian German Idealism and more specifically the relation between Kant and Fichte. What is German Idealism? What kind of ‘idealism’ is meant to be characteristic of the so-called German Idealists? How did Hegel and Fichte read Kant? To what extent was Fichte faithful to the Kantian philosophical motives? Is transcendental philosophy a representationalist or constructivist philosophy? In order to answer these questions I begin with an analysis of how Marxism and Analytical philosophy have understood ‘idealism’. Then I examine the polysemy of the term ‘idealism’ in the history of western philosophy from Plato to 19th Century British Idealism. The last four sections are dedicated to German Idealism’s reception of Kantian philosophy and the development of my thesis about constructivism, transcendental philosophy and German Idealism. I will suggest that German idealism came up with the Copernican revolution of Kant, whose constructivist insight permeates the views of Kant and his German idealist successors. Furthermore, I will suggest that the idealism of Fichte is a version of Kantian constructivism, or, put another way, the argument that we only know what we have built.

German Idealism is notoriously difficult to define: Is it a cultural movement, or a dedication to a certain set of philosophical positions? Should it be considered in terms of chronology and geography? Should it be defined by the unfavorable gaze of its detractors, and thereby, at least if we follow G. E. Moore, overcome? Is it a movement that begins, say, with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), includes Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and then ushers in the work of figures such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)?1 The other articles in this collection shed light on the looming issue of what German Idealism is, so I can leave this particular quixotic chase to others. I will assume for the sake of my story that German Idealism was, at the very least, shaped by a set of critical responses to Kant’s work, responses that preserved Kant’s view of system and the unity of reason, yet sought to overcome some of the troubling dualisms left in the wake of his critical work (in particular the one between intellect and sense).2 While not all post-Kantian paths led to Hegel, Hegel, dubbed by Rüdiger Bubner as “the absolute professor of Berlin,”3 was certainly a central figure of German Idealism. In what follows, a contrast between Hegel’s philosophical convictions and those of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) will be marked in order to clarify some of the differences between German Idealism and another recalcitrant (at least in terms of its definition) movement, early German Romanticism.4

List of contributors Introduction: interpreting German Idealism Karl Ameriks 1. The Enlightenment and Idealism Frederick Beiser 2. Absolute Idealism and the rejection of Kantian dualism Paul Guyer 3. Kant's practical philosophy Allen Wood 4. The aesthetic holism of Hamann, Herder and Schiller Daniel Dahlstrom 5. All or nothing: systematicity and nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold and Maimon Paul Franks 6. The early philosophy of Fichte and Schelling Rolf Peter Horstmann 7. Holderlin and Novalis Charles Larmore 8. Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic: an overview Terry Pinkard 9. Hegel's practical philosophy: the realization of freedom Robert Pippin 10. German realism: the self-limitation of Idealism in Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer Gunter Zoller 11. Politics and the new mythology: the turn to late Romanticism Dieter Sturma 12. German Idealism and the arts Andrew Bowie 13. The legacy of Idealism in the philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard Karl Ameriks Bibliography Index.

ABSTRACTThe project defended in this article is a forty-plus year attempt to argue for the continuing philosophical importance of the positions in theoretical and practical and aesthetic philosophy defended in what has come to be known as ‘German Idealism’ (or ‘post-Kantian German philosophy.’) For the most part this has concerned Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the relations among them, with most of the attention focused on Hegel. The Hegel interpretation has been criticized for its claim about the influence of Kant on Hegel’s account of apperceptive judgment, for the nature of the idealism ascribed to Hegel, and for the Kantian-Hegelian insistence on the autonomy and self-grounding authority of pure reason. The interpretation of Hegel’s practical philosophy has been criticized for defending an excessively social theory of agency, and the theory of modernization ascribed to Hegel has been criticized for claiming that philosophy could and should have a historically diagnostic task. The interpretation of Hegel’s theory of art argues that elements of Hegel’s basic philosophical position puts one in the best position to understand the meaning and importance of post-Hegelian pictorial modernism, that his general approach can be of great value in understanding his claim that great art had become ‘a thing of the past.’ A clarification of these positions, and a brief case for their philosophical importance comprises the substance of this recapitulation.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that human reason is inherently conflicted, because it demands a form of unconditioned knowledge that transcends its capacity; his solution to this conflict of reason relies on the idea that reason’s quest for the unconditioned can only be realized practically. This book proposes to view the conflict of reason, and Kant’s solution to this conflict, as the central problem shaping the contours of post-Kantian German Idealism. I contend that the rise and fall of German Idealism is to be told as a story about the different interpretations, appropriations, and radicalization of Kant’s prioritizing of the practical. The first part of the book explains why Kant’s critics and followers came to understand the aim of Kant’s critical philosophy in light of the conflict of reason. I argue that F. H. Jacobi and Salomon Maimon set the stage for the reception of Kant’s critical philosophy by conceiving its aim in terms of meeting reason’s demand for unconditioned knowledge, and by understanding the conflict of reason as a conflict between thinking and acting, or knowing and willing. The manner in which the post-Kantian German Idealists radicalized Kant’s prioritizing of the practical is the central topic of the second part of the book, which focuses on works by J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling. The third part of the book clarifies why, in order to solve the conflict of reason, Schelling and Rosenzweig developed the view that human experience is grounded in three irreducible elements—God, the natural world, and human beings—which relate in three temporal dimensions: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption.

The philosopher and physician Johann Benjamin Erhard (1766–1827) is a relatively little-studied, but very remarkable figure in the history of post-Kantian German thought. The peak of his creative activity occurred in the last decade of the 18th century – a time of heated discussions around the philosophy of I. Kant, when a number of thinkers, who appreciated the nature of the transformations he carried out, tried to continue his undertaking, challenging the positions of philosophical opponents. Developing some of his claims and moving away from others, they often found themselves in ideological confrontation both with Kant himself and with other Kantians. Along with K.L. Reingold, S. Maimon, J.G. Fichte, T. Schmaltz, L.H. Jacob, C.Chr.E. Schmid and other influential successors (and at the same time critics) of Kantian philosophy, J.B. Erhard was in the thick of these discussions, the course of which is reflected in one of his main works, “Devil’s Apology” (1795). This article, which represents a preface to the translation of this work into Russian, will examine its main within the framework of a number of philosophical problems and disagreements that were of key importance at the dawn of the development of one of the most important traditions of European philosophy – German idealism. Particular attention within the framework of the article will be paid to the position of the personality of Erhard himself in the philosophical context of his time; in particular, his personal contacts with famous contemporaries.

Reviewed by: Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought Alexander Mathäs Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought. Edited by Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 329. Cloth $95. ISBN 978-0521897532. This commendable anthology of essays focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophical concepts of the unconscious. More specifically, the study’s declared goal is to provide “an in-depth account” of the conceptual history of the unconscious from its Cartesian origins to Freud (2). The editors deliberately chose the title, Thinking the Unconscious, to distinguish their approach from “Henri F. Ellenberger’s magisterial [End Page 403] The Discovery of the Unconscious” (3). In contrast to Ellenberger, the editors do not want to suggest that the unconscious is a universal phenomenon like the brain. By presenting the object of their study in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition, Nicholls and Liebscher view the unconscious as a product of human activity rather than as an object that could be detected or found. The volume’s approach, with its emphasis on key figures of German idealism such as Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Carus, as well as their nineteenth-century successors Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Hartmann, Fechner, Nietzsche, and Freud, effectively demonstrates how basic assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis can be attributed to a dialectic between competing idealist philosophy and empiricist science. Yet the editors are aware of the pitfalls of construing the teleology from German idealism to psychoanalysis that can be found in some older studies, such as Ellenberger’s Detecting the Unconscious, Whyte’s The Unconscious Before Freud, and Hemecker’s Before Freud (Vor Freud). Rather than projecting such a predisposed view onto pre-Freudian concepts of the unconscious, it is the editors’ intention to present these sources “in their own independent historical and philosophical contexts” without neglecting to point out significant similarities to the Freudian model (22). The anthology possesses a high degree of coherence, which results from the authors’ engagement with each others’ contributions. At the same time the volume benefits from the inclusion of differing, even deviating viewpoints. For instance, “some [contributors] see deep-seated affinity between Goethe and Freud on the unconscious; while others . . . see this purported affinity as being part of the historical mythology of psychoanalysis, which is based upon [the] fallacious teleology” mentioned above (23). It would take up too much space to elaborate on the different arguments of all eleven contributions here. Suffice it to say that the essays reveal remarkable erudition and that the volume benefits from a variety of perspectives. I will mainly refer to the editors’ superb introduction, which includes references to the pertinent and up-to-date research on the topic, and Günter Gödde’s chapter 10, which summarizes many of the arguments made in the preceding chapters. Nicholls and Liebscher point out that the division between conscious and subconscious thought already emerged during the Enlightenment. Leibniz’s “petites perceptions,” that is, perceptions that are “too minute and too numerous” to enter reflexive consciousness or thought, can be viewed as a prototype of the subconscious (7). This model, which also bears similarities to the Freudian concept of repression, is still of relevance for today’s psychology of cognition (Gödde 262). Examples of this model are discussed in chapter 8 of the volume, with regard to the psychophysics of Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), and Theodor Lipps (1851–1914). Although for Kant, the unconscious “never became an explicit question for consideration,” the editors refer to specific examples from his work to show that the idea is a latent part of Kantian thought (18). Kant’s identification of “unconscious,” “dark,” or [End Page 404] “obscure” representations in his anthropology, his contempt for the instinctual desires in his ethics, and his assumption of the unconscious nature of human creativity in his aesthetics testify to his acute awareness of the power of “sensuous intuitions and sensations” in the economy of the human psyche (9–18). Although Kant’s system did not give much room to considerations of the unconscious, his successors—the representatives of post-Kantian German idealism (chapters 2 and 3), especially the Romantic tradition that emerged from Herder’s and...

This chapter combines an analysis of the structure of Kant's critique of earlier metaphysics with a historical account of how this critique could have had as its fate the remarkable rise of a new kind of metaphysics in the era of German Idealism. It begins with the general observation that the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason does not attempt, let alone accomplish, the kind of complete destruction of metaphysics that many of its readers have supposed. Many traditional transcendent metaphysical ideas are allowed to be not only coherent but also assertable, once the demands of regulative and practical reason are allowed to supplement the thoughts of constitutive theoretical reason. Moreover, the Critique's stress on notions such as idealism, things in themselves, and the ‘unconditioned’ created (as William Hamilton noted) a ‘spectre’ that ‘haunted’ and stimulated German Idealism's new metaphysics of the ‘absolute’. Although Kant offers a radical critique of all earlier systems of a spiritualist or materialist kind, he also believes that something metaphysical should be affirmed beyond the spatiotemporal features of our experience. It is argued that for both Kant and German Idealism, this metaphysics is at least not any kind of subjectivism, and it need not present a special threat to most of our common realist beliefs.

Immanuel Kant helped launch "the next big thing" in German Idealism during the summer of 1791, two months after celebrating his sixty-seventh birthday. It had been ten years since the publication of his long-awaited Critique of Pure Reason, and the past decade had been filled with a remarkable output of writings developing Kant's "critical philosophy," including his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), as well as an important second edition of the first Critique (1787). Although the first Critique lacked sympathetic and competent early readers, support for his philosophical innovations widened steadily during the 1780s, and a growing stream of pilgrims began to make their way to Königsberg, a city of fifty thousand souls lying in the far northeastern corner of Europe.1

It is one of the effects caused by the critical philosophy, that metaphysics qua ontology and qua ‘metaphysica specialis’ has suffered discredit. Even the metaphysical systems of ‘German Idealism’ are, according to how they were understood by their authors, rooted in Kant’s insight, that ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics is impossible. When, in Germany around the end of the 19th century, neo-Kantianism arose, the essence of Kant’s critical philosophy was supposed to be its intrinsic connection with the natural sciences, especially Newtonian physics. The Critique of Pure Reason no longer found any interest as a systematic critique of all possible attempts to know the suprasensible, or as an attempt to rescue freedom of the will, which was seen as indispensible to morals. It was taken even less seriously as a destruction of a deductive ontology of the type of Christian Wolff. The effect of the first critique was so overwhelming that it has almost become commonplace to see the foundation of everyday or scientific experience as the proper task of theoretical philosophy. Had not Kant taught that all (theoretical) knowledge lies within the limits of actual or possible experience and that our concepts, including the mathematical ones, could not possibly have any sense and meaning, if the range of possible experience was left behind? He seemed to anticipate with this the fundamental thesis of Vienna Circle positivism, which was that every nonanalytic sentence which cannot be verified or falsified by experience is simply without significance.