Kant on Freedom of the Will and the Development of Classical German Philosophy

This work is the second part of a work published in 2022 („The Concept of the Free Will in the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence”), where I elaborated on the concepts of the free will and the eternal recurrence in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I chose to present in this article the point of view of Søren Kierkegaard that corrects and completes the overthrow of all values that takes place in Nietzsche’s writings. If the German philosopher states a type of freedom achieved through extrem individualism and personal morality, Kierkegaard withholds the freedom that emerges from the relation with God and a free will dependent on choices that can dissapear (alongside freedom) when the individual does not respect (conciously or not) the paradox of faith and does not take into account God when making a decision.

Albertus Magnus (1193?-1280), also known as doctor universalis, delved into several fields of science and philosophy, a pursuit which resulted in a massive production of works. Within these works, however, one discerns a provocative paradox, in which a cleric is involved in a forbidden art: magic. In this paper I argue that a paradox of this kind can be justified and explained in terms of philosophy. To this end, I advance three case studies to shed light on the afore-mentioned problem. First, I scrutinize indirect and direct sources in order to clarify Albertus’s relation to magic, thus addressing whether it is possible to trace any supportive data that permits a connection between magic and philosophy. Next, I show that this connection is achievable, since some parts of Albertus’s philosophy, such as psychology, cosmology and the liberum arbitrium, seem to be associated with magia naturalis in terms of astrology. Finally, I argue that the German philosopher was not successful in legitimizing magic through philosophy, and thus failed to prove himself a unique pioneer of an innovative body of knowledge.

Reviewed by: The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, and: Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde Tom Quirk The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 405. $74.95. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Mark Antliff. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 237. In his fine contribution to the collection of essays in The Crisis in Modernism, Richard Lehan observes that Bergson “undid the notions of mechanism and teleology, undercut both Enlightenment and Darwinian assumptions, gave weight to the modernist belief that art is the highest function of our activity, and helped establish the modernist belief that the universe is inseparable from mind and that the self is created out of memory. If the moderns did not have Bergson, they would have had to invent him” (311). Of course the moderns did have Bergson, but the fact did not prevent them from inventing him anyway, and the overly eager appropriations and reformulations of his thought prior to the Great War were so widespread that it was common to speak of an international “Bergson mania.” The point is worth making because, though no one would dispute Bergson’s central importance to modernism, we are, more than a hundred years after the publication of Time and Free Will (1889), far from reaching a consensus on the extent or the consequences of that influence. It seems implausible, not to say outlandish, to claim that Bergson is a neglected figure in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. Nevertheless, the editors of The Crisis in Modernism are entirely justified in suggesting that Bergson’s work may well represent “a repressed content of modern thought” (7), and their provocative and various collection of essays serves to substantiate that view. The volume is divided into three parts: historical background; vitalism in twentieth-century philosophy and science; and vitalism in twentieth-century literature and aesthetics. There is considerable slippage in this organization (George Rousseau’s essay on the background of vitalism, for example, carries well into the twentieth century, and Sanford Schwartz’s and Richard Lehan’s essays in the third section supply historical backgrounds of their own) but the arrangement is more or less satisfactory. In part 1, George Rousseau supplies a broad and highly particularized historical background to the vitalist movement, beginning with its origins in the biological debates between preformationists (mechanists) and epigeneticists (vitalists) in the Enlightenment and the manifold responses to Cartesian dualism and mechanistic hypotheses that cast doubts upon the active hand of a living creator. He follows the intricate course of vitalism through such romantics as Goethe, Novalis, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, and ends with a consideration of the “new vitalism” of the German scientist and philosopher Hans Dreisch and Bergson. The concluding section of Rousseau’s essay serves in addition as an introduction to a never before translated essay by Mikhail Bakhtin entited “Contemporary Vitalism”—a thoroughgoing critique of Dreisch’s vitalism as founded upon unscientific metaphysical postulates, in particular his notion of equipotential systems and his revivification of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy as an explanatory principle. The first section is completed by more focused essays on particular antecedents to twentieth-century vitalism. Jack H. Hager considers Coleridge, in Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life and some of his unpublished writings, to have anticipated Bergson in several ways, but as having stopped short of articulating a full-blown immanentist philosophy. Frederick Burwick explores Sir Charles [End Page 175] Bell’s vitalist challenge to William Paley’s mechanistic Natural Theology; particularly in his study of the human hand, Bell argued that a mechanistic physiological explanation of how the sensory organization of the nervous system transmits information to the brain is deficient and requires the study of vital systems, rather than positing the concept of a vital essence to give a full account of this mystery. Finally, Frederick Amrine contests Nietzsche’s status as a Lebenphilosoph; his concept of life is essentially a drained one, at best a “semantic halo” (143). “If Nietzsche stands in...

This paper focuses on J.G. Fichte’s and M. Blondel’s “philosophy of freedom”: in their different philosophical perspectives these authors defend the human freedom with important arguments and theorize the philosophy as education for freedom. The first section of the work discusses the overcoming of determinism (Uberwindung des Determinismus) in Fichte’s Theory of Science (Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, 1796-99). According to the German philosopher, the will is the foundation of human thought, and the cognitive act (Bestimmung) is an “act of free will” (Willensbestimmung). The second section analyzes the study and the revival of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy in French culture of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, we have examined authors as Maine de Biran, Jules Lequier, and especially Maurice Blondel. Even in these prospects freedom is interpreted as the foundation of knowledge, as the condition of possibility of thought and being: «liber sum, ergo cogito, ergo sum». Blondel has theorized a “science of practical” focused on human action. In his first work (L’Action, 1893) he makes an important distinction between the willing will (volonte voulante) and the willed will (volonte voulue): the willing will is the desire for the infinite that is in man, is the transcendence of the ego. Through these considerations on the “metaphysics of subject” Blondel comes to deal with the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, the natural and the supernatural.

Fichte’s doctrine played a significant role in the emergence of Neo-Kantian philosophical projects both in Germany and in Russia. This paper proceeds from the works of Boris Vysheslavtsev, Boris Yakovenko and Henry Lanz and tries to reconstruct the influences exerted by Fichte’s ideas on the philosophical ideas of Russian Neo-Kantians. The historical-philosophical works of Russian Neo-Kantians constitute an integral body which provides an interpretative context of Fichte’s philosophy and forms an inalienable and significant part of Fichte studies in Russia. The main tendency of these works is an attempt to bring Fichte’s doctrine closer to Russian philosophy, to represent his philosophical system in its entirety without dividing it into autonomous periods, drawing attention to the ethical character of his philosophy and stressing the German philosopher’s contribution to the study of the problem of the irrational. The works of Russian Neo-Kantians are characterised by particular attention to Fichte’s ideal-realist ideas, his logicistic approach to absolute being, the attempt to overcome the contradiction between absolute unity and the concrete manifold. Fichte’s idea of the primacy of practical reason, which shaped the image of Fichtean philosophy in Gertman Neo-Kantianism, was taken up and developed in an original way by Russian Neo-Kantians. Vysheslavtsev made a consistent attempt to derive law, the state and economics from the ethical content of epistemology, “the science of knowledge”; Yakovenko suggested interpreting “the science of knowledge” as a teaching on life and freedom, as the philosophical grounding of the Christian idea; Lanz wrote about Fichte’s philosophy in the same vein as “the revolt of morality against theory”, as a philosophy of freedom.

Classical German Philosophy belongs to the heritage of the European philosophical tradition, in which philosophical knowledge is defined as an epistemological reflection. Philosophy reflects on scientific knowledge to demonstrate its possibility. Thus objective knowledge is defined as a system whose principle is subjectivity. Since the 19th century, this concept of knowledge has been questioned as has subjectivity as such. Since then, philosophy in Germany has departed from comprehensive reflection and turned towards matters of detail or issues of application. In this paper I argue that the trend of skepticism about knowledge in modern German philosophy is associated with the radical social upheavals of modernity, but without being accompanied by a critical understanding of these upheavals. The first task is to reconstruct the classical concept of knowledge as it appeared in German philosophy, including its crucial relation to scientific knowledge and to history. The second task is to engage with the observation that this tradition of thought is in danger of being lost today. I will point out the role which the linguistic turn in philosophy has played and the means of deconstructing it.

In this essay I want to examine Husserl’s relation to the “classical” German background of his thought with respect to one concept in particular: history. Since Herder and Kant, German philosophers had devoted special attention to history and accorded it an important place in their thought. The central role of history in German philosophy reached its peak in Hegel, and although there was a widespread backlash against the dominance of Hegelian thought after his death, many aspects of his thought survived in the German philosophy of the nineteenth century. History was one of these. Thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, the historians of the Historical School, and Wilhelm Dilthey denounced the Hegelian philosophy of history and were firmly convinced that they had liberated themselves from it. And indeed each of these rejected important features of Hegel’s philosophy of history. But they retained, sometimes even without realizing it, the underlying historicization of reason and experience that lay at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy.

In contemporary human sciences, the concept of activity continues to play a key, methodologically central role, since it is used in attempts to give a universal characterization of either the whole human world (in classical German and Marxist philosophy) or the inner world of a concrete individual (primarily in Soviet psychology). In either case, the category of activity is elevated to the level of a universal, ultimate abstraction, which, in E.G. Iudin's words, "combines empirical certainty with theoretical depth and methodological constructiveness" [11, p. 249].

We ignore the history of philosophy at our peril. Engels, who typically conflates Marx and Marxism, points to the relation of Marxism to the tradition while also denying it. In his little book on Feuerbach, Engels depicts Feuerbach as leading Marx away from Hegel, away from classical German philosophy, away from philosophy and towards materialism and science. This view suggests that Marx is at best negatively related to Classical German philosophy, including Hegel. Yet Engels elsewhere suggests that Marx belongs to the classical German philosophical tradition. In the preface to Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels wrote: “We German socialists are proud that we trace our descent not only from Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel” (Marx & Engels, Collected Works). In this paper I will focus on Marx’s relation to Fichte. This relation is rarely mentioned in the Marxist debate, but I will argue, it is crucial for the formulation of Marx’s position, and hence for assessing his contribution accurately. One of the results of this study will be to indicate that Marx, in reacting against Hegel, did not, as is often suggested, ‘leave’ philosophy, but in fact made a crucial philosophical contribution.

The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical and historical background to current discussions about the changing relationships between the university and the state through revisiting the classical model of the university as discussed in classical German philosophy. This historical detour is intended to highlight the cultural rootedness of the modern idea of the university, and its close links to the idea of the modern national state. The paper discusses the idea of the university as it emerges from the philosophy of Wilhelm von Humbold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as well as - in the 20 th century - Karl Jaspers and Jurgen Habermas. More detailed questions discussed include the historical pact between the modern university and the modern nation-state, the main principles of the Humboldtian university, the process of the nationalization of European universities, the national aspect of the German idea of culture (Bildung), and the tension between the pursuit of truth and public responsibilities of the modern university. In discussing current and future missions and roles of the institution of the university today, it can be useful to revisit its foundational (modern) German idea. In thinking about its future, it can be constructive to reflect on the evident current tensions between traditional modern expectations of the university and the new expectations intensified by the emergence of knowledge-based societies and market- driven economies. From the perspective of the tensions between old and new tasks of the university, it is useful to look back at the turning point in its history.

The volume brings together contributions in the spirit embodied by Marek J. Siemek († 2011) and Jakub Kloc-Konkołowicz († 2021), two Warsaw philosophers truly devoted to Classical German Philosophy. They were simultaneously in a relationship between thinker and adept, and thinker and thinker. They both taught philosophy, with a strong emphasis on classic German philosophy, at Warsaw University. Under the theme “Ethical Theory in Classic German Philosophy Then and Now,” students and companions continue their discussions with both of them.

The theme of property is directly relevant to some of the most divisive social and political issues today, such as wealth inequality and the question of whether governments should limit it by introducing measures that restrict the right to property. Yet what is property? And when seeking to answer this question, do we tend to identify the concept with just one dominant historical form of property? In this book, David James reconstructs the theories of property developed by four key figures in classical German philosophy - Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx. He argues that although their theories of property are different, the concept of social recognition plays a crucial role in all of them, and assesses these philosophers' arguments for the specific forms of property they claim should exist in a society that is genuinely committed to the idea of freedom.

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche pointed out that the classical German Philosophy was the expression of a covert Theology. In fact, from Lessing to Hegel, through Kant, trough the Idealists and the Romantics, German philosophers and thinkers studied in protestant schools and seminaries, for the most part, of pietist orientation. This article shows the general characteristics of pietism and how it influenced the problems statement, the doctrines and ideas of some of these philosophers.

I hesitate to say this, but I am afraid that this chapter, more than most thus far, is rather long on the social theory and short on nursing practice. There is a reason for this. The topic that we are going to examine is not at all easy. Embedded as it is in the complex intellectual world of German philosophy, there is no quick way of explaining it. On the grounds that a rapid sweep would merely leave readers puzzled, I have opted for going through critical theory at a deliberating pace. The chapter starts by examining the roots of critical theory in classical German philosophy. It then goes on to address the ideas of the first wave of critical theorists, paying especial attention to Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. I then move on to the central figure of the discussion, Jürgen Habermas, and his theory of communicative action. Following this, we get to health care issues. Two approaches are taken. First, I review critical theory critiques of medicine, and then I go on to recount my own Habermasian analysis of the adoption of communicative action in new nursing.