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PART I. KANT
PART II. SUCCESSORS
Acknowledgments
This volume is dedicated to the memory of my closest colleague at Notre Dame, Gary Gutting (1942–2019), an exemplary friend, philosopher, and teacher of teachers. He is sorely and widely missed. In these worrisome times, I am all the more indebted to my wife Geraldine and our whole family. We remain energized by being, for the most part, still near many of our longtime Notre Dame friends, including, of late, Robert Audi and Peter van Inwagen. Their active presence has been a constant spur for me to keep trying to make philosophical progress, and in a cosmopolitan vein—even if we cannot keep up with their whirlwind academic travels.
For this volume I am indebted in particular to the helpful philosophers behind the events that led to these essays, especially: Nicholas Boyle, Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, Eckart Förster, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Jane Kneller, Charles Larmore, Béatrice Longuenesse, Michela Massimi, Dalia Nasser, Jörg Noller, Judith Norman, Onora O’Neill, Robert Pippin, Fred Rush, Susan Meld Shell, Dieter Sturma, Eric Watkins, and Rachel Zuckert, as well as again to Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford and my senior guides on these topics to this day—Karsten Harries, David Carr, Gerold Prauss, and Manfred Frank. Thanks also to help at Notre Dame from Linda Grams and Aaron Wells, as well as the organizers, editors, and participants at the meetings in which versions of these chapters were presented in Providence, Philadelphia, Worcester, Knoxville, Berlin, Tübingen, Munich, Notre Dame, San Diego, Edinburgh, Bonn, Warwick, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, New Haven, Vienna, and New York.
My focus on many of the themes in this volume was especially inspired by my Europe-oriented godparents, Lula Jean Elliott (New York/Munich/La Jolla) and Franz Mikkelsons (Riga/Chicago), along with all our immigrant relatives and their children, the young and diverse latest generation of United States “Ameriki”: Nolan, Keizen, Tyki, Teo, Jack, and Maude (a namesake of my mother, who was fortunate, like many others then, to be born in Brooklyn, and a birthright citizen, to a family just escaping from the czar’s reach).
Except for Chapters 1 and 8, which have not been published elsewhere, the essays in this book (now reformatted and updated, with minor but numerous revisions), which have appeared in an earlier form in the following publications, are reprinted with permission, and their publishers are hereby thankfully acknowledged: “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’,” in Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity, Kate Moran (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 171–94 (also presented as the 2014 Walter de Gruyter APA Kant Prize
Note on Sources and Key to Abbreviations and Translations
References to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Critik der reinen Vernunft, Riga: Hartknoch, 1781 and 1787) are given in the standard way by citing pages of the first (“A”) and/or second (“B”) edition, and use the translation of Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan and Co. (1923). Otherwise, references to Kant’s works use the abbreviations below and cite, in square brackets, the volume and page of the Academy edition: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Ausgabe der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900ff). Details on translations are given in the list of references at the end of this volume.
List 1: Kant’s Writings, Listed by Abbreviation
Anth Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) [7: 119–333], trans. in Kant (2007).
AnthFried “Anthropologie Friedländer” (1775–6) [25: 469–728], trans. in ssss (2012b).
Auf “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (1784) [8: 35–42], trans. in Kant (1996a).
Bem Bemerkungen in den “Beobachtungen iiber das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen” (1764–65), ed. Marie Rischmüller, Hamburg: Meiner, 1991, trans. in Kant (2011b) [corrected edition of [29: 1–102]].
Br Briefwechsel [10]–[12], trans. in part in Kant (1999).
Diss di mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principii [“Inaugural Dissertation”] (1770) [2: 385–419], trans. in Kant (1992a).
EaD “Das Ende aller Dinge” (1794) [8: 327–39], trans. in Kant (2nd edition, 2017).
EEMW “Etwas über den Einfluß des Mondes auf die Witterung” (1794) [8: 315–24], trans. in Kant (2012a).
Feyerabend “Naturrecht Feyerabend” (1784) [27: 1319–94], trans. in Kant (2016).
G Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) [4: 387–463], trans. in Kant (2011a).
Idee “Idee zur einer allgemeinen Weltgeschichte in weltbürgerlichen Absicht” (1784) [8: 17–31], trans. in Kant (2007).
JL Immanuel Kants Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen [“Jäsche”] (1800) [9: 1–150], trans. in Kant (1992b).
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788) [5: 1–164], trans. in Kant (1996a).
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) [5: 164–486], trans. in Kant (2000).
MdS Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797–8) [6: 205–493], trans. in Kant (1996a).
MetD “Metaphysik Dohna” (1792–3) [28: 615–702], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
MetM “Metaphysik Mrongovius” (1782–3) [29: 747–940], trans. in Kant (1997a).
MetV “Metaphysics Volckmann” (1784–5) [28: 440–50], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
MK2 “Metaphysik K2” (early 1790s) [29: 753–75], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML1 “Metaphysik L1” [Pölitz] (1770s) [28: 157–350], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
ML2 “Metaphysik L2” (1790–1?) [28: 531–610], trans. in part in Kant (1997a).
MM2 “Moral Mrongovius II” (1784–5) [597–633], trans. in Kant (1997b).
Nachschrift “Nachschrift zu Christian Gottlieb Mielckes Littauisch-deutschem und deutsch-littauischem Wörterbuch,” (1800) [8: 445], trans. in Kant (2007).
Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783) [4: 255–383], trans. in Kant (2004).
Raum “Vom dem ersten Grund des Untesrchieds der Gegenden im Raume,” (1768) [2: 377-83], trans. in Kant (1992a).
Refl Reflexionen [16]–[18], trans. in part in Kant (2005).
Rel Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793–4) [6: 1–202], trans. in Kant (2nd edition, 2017).
RevSch “Rezension von Johann Heinrich Schulz’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur Sittenlehre für alle Menschen, ohne Unterschied der Religion, nebst einem Anhang von den Todesstrafen” (1783) [8: 10–14], trans. in Kant (1996a).
RezHerder “Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (erster Teil)”; “Erinnerungen des Rezensenten der Herderschen Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit über ein in Februar des Teutschen Merkur gegen diese Rezension gerichtetes Schreiben”; “Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (zweiter Teil)” (1785) [8: 43–66], trans. in Kant (2007).
RL “Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz” (1817) [28: 993–1126], trans. in Kant (1996b).
SF Der Streit der Fakultäten in drei Abschnitten (1798) [7: 5–116], trans. in Kant (1996b).
TP Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis (1793) [8: 275–313], trans. in Kant (1996a).
VzeF Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Tractats zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie (1796) [8: 413–22], trans. in Kant (2002).
VorlM Immanuel Kant: Vorlesung zu Moralphilosophie (1770s), ed. Werner Stark, Berlin: de Gruyter (2004) (a newly edited version of MPC, using Kaehler’s notes).
WHO “Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?” (1786) [8: 133–47], trans. in Kant (1996b).
ZeF Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (1795, 1796) [8: 343–86], trans. in Kant (1996a).
List 2: Abbreviations for Works by Other Authors
E Prauss, Gerold. Die Einheit von Subjekt und Objekt. Kants Probleme mit den Sachen selbst, Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber (2015).
HW Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt (1970).
JN Noller, Jörg. Die Bestimmung des Willens. Zum Problem individueller Freiheit im Ausgang von Kant, Freiburg and Munich: Alber (2015).
RSV New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, Augsburg: Fortress Press (1992).
SW Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart: Cotta (1856–61).
PART I KANT
1
Introduction to an Extended Era
1.1. Three Kinds of Kantian Subjects
The title Kantian Subjects is to be understood as having a threefold meaning. First, it signifies a discussion of various topics related to Kant’s Critical philosophy. Second, it concerns the specific thought that Kant himself had a distinctive—and often still misunderstood—non-Luciferian1 conception of what it is to be a subject, especially in the context of modernity, that is, the era dominated by Newton’s and Rousseau’s demanding claims about our being bound, fortunately, by universal necessities. For this reason, much of the volume focuses on the Critical philosophy’s “keystone” notions of absolute freedom and strict law, and their combination in the complex concept of an individual subject’s fundamental capacity for self-determination, practical as well as theoretical. Third, the title also points to the idea that, after Kant’s work, there is a significant sense in which most of us—that is, reflective, educated citizens of post-1780s Western civilization— have, to a large extent, become subjects in a late modern and broadly (but only indirectly) Kantian kind of culture.
To be a “Kantian subject” in this extended, cultural sense, is to understand oneself as having entered into a distinctive late form of what Herder, Kant’s early and most prominent student, called “this autumn of our reflectiveness.”2 With the rise, already in the 1790s, of harsh critiques of Kant’s system in its orthodox form, the classical modern period of philosophy came to a disappointing end. It immediately morphed, however, into a still enduring eon of post-Kantianism, a period that has often been obsessed with attacking Kant while nevertheless defining itself in terms of significant relations to his Critical philosophy and especially its notion of autonomy. Step by step, the initial attempts to restore the classical modern (Cartesian, Leibnizian, transcendental) ideal of a boldly optimistic system of tightly linked scientific, metaphysical, and theological claims to knowledge of pure necessities gave way to a closely related and yet distinct philosophical and
1 See Chapter 6 for a critique of Iris Murdoch’s influential remark about Lucifer. Murdoch (1970) connects Kant to Milton simply by comparing her own highly unappealing notion of the Kantian subject with Milton’s Lucifer, while offering no clear textual grounds and entirely overlooking the positive connections of Kant to Milton and religion. See also Chapter 12 and Kant’s reference (KU §49) to Milton’s use of “heaven” and “hell” as paradigmatic “aesthetic Ideas.”
2 Herder (1997, 46). See my (2011), (2018a), and (forthcoming b). In this context it is not inappropriate to also think of phenomena such as Beethoven (a reader of Kant), and the issue of “late style” in music as discussed (in their own late work) by Adorno (1998) and Said (2003).
cultural outlook. In its most influential forms of self-understanding, this outlook turned to stressing the contingencies of history and a narrative of belatedness,3 although always still under the sign of Kant’s general enlightenment goals. Hence, this volume’s subtitle: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity 4
A complication of this era is that the Kantian subjects who occupy it, within philosophy and in culture at large, fall into quite different groups. Some work energetically against, or even sympathetically with, numerous unfortunate caricatures that define the Critical philosophy in hopelessly subjectivist, monological, or anti-natural terms. Others work basically in line with Kant’s own thought but stress the need to supplement it in significant ways in order to be more effective in achieving the main goals of enlightenment in a later age. This volume will occasionally concern writings in the first group, which can be shown to involve influential misunderstandings of the Critical philosophy, but its main concern will be with members of the second group, and with pointing out underappreciated ways in which they carry forward Kant’s spirit in a manner most appropriate for our own times.
1.2. Overview of the Whole
These preliminaries should help explain why this volume is divided into two parts—“Kant” and “Successors”—and how there is an internal relation between these parts.5 The main focus in most of the essays in the first part is to make clear, from a variety of perspectives, exactly how central, multi-layered, and ambiguous Kant’s notion of self-determination is. These essays explain the notion both in terms of complexities in Kant’s own texts as well as in relation to current interpretations that pick up on, or tend to distort, one or other of its basic features. More specifically, since the notion of self-determination involves both the concepts of
3 Perhaps the best short characterization of the era comes, not surprisingly, from Friedrich Hölderlin, who was obsessed with what is to be done in what he calls our “age of need” (dürftiger Zeit). This theme in Hölderlin is well known for having been stressed by Martin Heidegger, but in a non-Kantian way. My own study of Hölderlin and Heidegger was first stimulated by the teaching of Karsten Harries, and a version of Chapter 12 was presented at a conference in his honor at Yale.
4 Some of the main ideas of this story already appear in my (2006), chs. 11–13 and (2012), chs. 13–15 (the term “late modern” is explained at 307). In the present volume, however, even more attention is given to the philosophical significance of writings from the Early Romantic era. While my (2000a) stressed negative features of the post-Kantian reaction to Kant, later works have turned more to a focus on distinctive positive strands in the work of his successors.
5 The essays in this volume are closely connected in time of publication as well as theme. Most of them have a publication date of 2017 or after, and the remaining essays were published in the period 2013–15. The essays are presented in a natural thematic sequence but can also be read individually in any order. Numerous cross-references are provided for readers who may take the latter option. Readers familiar with earlier versions of these essays may notice that numerous emendations and clarifications have been made for this volume, but no substantial changes are intended.
self and of determination, it is possible, and quite common, to misconstrue Kant’s use of these concepts in overly individualistic or contingent terms. In clarifying these points, the essays in Part I build on, but also go beyond, arguments presented in my earlier works. They offer my first treatment of several of Kant’s lesser known positions, as well as new reactions to work by leading senior scholars such as Eckart Förster, Paul Guyer, Charles Larmore, Onora O’Neill, and Gerold Prauss, along with arguments that connect with recent work by younger Kant specialists such as Michela Massimi, Jörg Noller, Owen Ware, and Eric Watkins.
The second part of the book, on the post-Kantians, is not at all an incidental addendum but is ultimately the book’s main concern. It provides a set of overlapping arguments that there are positive connections—as well as a few key differences—between genuine Kantianism and what is most valuable in the ever-developing post-Kantian tradition. The best post-Kantian writing follows Kant in building on a threefold respect for modern science, autonomy-oriented practical philosophy, and—in the wake of these developments—the thought that philosophy has a distinctive constructive role to play even after we have absorbed the main lessons of the Scientific and French Revolutions as well as of the limits of philosophy in the old, broadly Cartesian style.
The main positive line to be drawn between Kant’s own modern philosophical era, and the late modern era that began right after his work, concerns the replacement of Kant’s still largely non-historical and quasi-scientific systematic conception of philosophy with a more explicitly historical methodology, one that consists largely in strings of detailed argumentative correction and appropriation of one’s main predecessors. In discussing the complex interactions of figures such as Herder, Reinhold, Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel, I argue that their work, at its best, introduced a productive new paradigm for philosophy, one that stresses history, subjectivity, and aesthetics in a progressive way that avoids the shortcomings of historicism, subjectivism, and aestheticism. Rather than regarding their philosophical remarks, and literary experiments of a philosophical nature, as a weak substitute for enlightened science, politics, or religion, we should read these post-Kantians as providing a valuable supplement to, and powerful reinforcement of, what is most valuable in these institutions. This strategy builds on an influential idea found already in Kant, namely, that the insights of cultural “geniuses” can be understood as being creatively “exemplary”—especially for questions of humanity’s vocation (Bestimmung)—in a successive manner that allows for noteworthy progress even in the absence of an apodictic path of scientific or philosophic proof, mystical intuition, or precise imitation. I compare and contrast my arguments here with recent work by, among others, Frederick Beiser, Robert Brandom, Manfred Frank, Gregg Horowitz, Stephen Houlgate, Odo Marquard, Robert Pippin, and Richard Rorty.
1.3. Overview of Part I: Kant
Chapter 2, “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’,” begins with a clarification of the central concept of the Kantian era. It argues for a middle path between two extreme but common ways of reacting to Kant’s Groundwork account of moral self-determination as autonomy. In this case, the Scylla objection claims that to speak of the moral law as rooted in self-legislation, that is, with a stress on the “auto” component of “autonomy,” is to be too subjective and to do an injustice to the essentially receptive character of our reason. Here the contention is that Kant misunderstands how reason is a capacity that basically appreciates reasons to act given to the subject by what is outside of it. The contrasting Charybdis concern stems from a worry about what can appear to be an overly close connection drawn between morality and freedom as autonomy. Here the critic’s contention is that the “nomos” component of self-determination in the Groundwork is too restrictive, and in a sense overly objective. Insofar as it makes our action appear so thoroughly law-oriented that it seems to leave only the options of being forced either by our reason to follow the moral law, or by the “natural necessity” of our sensibility to go against the moral law; and thus (in contrast at least to Kant’s own later works) it does injustice to the full power of our faculty of free choice and our ability to act in ways more complex than these two narrow options. I explain both how Kant can defend himself against these objections (especially worries about the notion of “giving the law to oneself”), and how, because of various terminological complications, it is not surprising that the worries have been raised.
The essay focuses on the argument at the end of Section II of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and concludes that, far from serving as an independent Archimedean lever, Kant’s introduction of what he calls a “principle of autonomy” is dependent upon the prior formulations of the categorical imperative and is fundamentally a thesis about the autonomy of a pure faculty of reason (not to be identified with mere rationality). The key point is that, given the substantive necessity in the content and force of the imperative, and the limitations of the faculties of sensibility and understanding, a faculty of pure practical reason (Wille) is required—just as, for Kant, pure intuition is required for the substantive necessities of the Transcendental Aesthetic that cannot be grounded in sensibility or understanding.
Chapter 3, “From A to B: On ‘Critique and Morals’,” presents an account of why it is that the Groundwork was suddenly written at the particular time that it appeared (1785)—an important issue that, surprisingly, is rarely discussed. This time was not only shortly after there had appeared several harsh criticisms and misunderstandings of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but also at a moment when Kant was forced to become aware of a growing wave of anti-libertarian writings in general—not only in standard Leibnizian and Spinozist circles but
also among younger writers such as Herder and J. H. Schulz. Understanding this context, and the fact that Kant had left the status of the grounds for our belief in absolute freedom unclear in the first edition of his Critique, helps considerably in explaining several features of the second edition (1787) as well as the genesis of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and its surprising invocation of a “fact of reason.”6 My interpretation of this phase of Kant’s work is presented as a contrast to some aspects of important recent work on the period by Förster.
Chapter 4, “Revisiting Freedom as Autonomy,” focuses on two significant new interpretations of Kant, one in a book-length review of the literature by a German scholar, Jörg Noller, and the other in a sequence of closely linked apologetic studies of Kant by the Canadian philosopher, Owen Ware. Noller presents a valuable treatment of the background of key Kantian terms such as Willkür and Wille, and this provides another opportunity to more precisely define my account of how Kant’s notions of freedom and autonomy are to be understood within the developments of Kant’s Critical period. In his interpretation, Ware argues—against positions that I and others have favored—that, instead of a great “reversal,” there is considerable agreement between Kant’s discussions of freedom in the Groundwork and the second Critique. While appreciating many of the subtle points Ware raises, I stress passages that still support the claim that there is an important methodological distinction between the approaches of Kant’s two main books on ethics.7
Chapter 5, “Once Again: The End of All Things,” concerns a widely neglected but very noteworthy short essay by Kant, written right around the time of his retirement. In discussing “the end of all things,” and in pairing the issues of immortality and the phenomenon of continuing interest in an apocalypse (which has numerous political aspects that he dares to touch on in a controversial fashion), Kant forces himself to address some of the most difficult features of his ethics and metaphysics. In particular, he gives a new and challenging account of how the nature of the self, and its vocation, is to be understood in light of his general doctrine of the transcendental ideality of time. I argue that, after considerable preliminary work, sense can be given to Kant’s discussion of the mysterious notion of “noumenal duration,” but I also point out that the implications of his account contrast with what one might naturally believe that he meant in his many earlier, albeit brief, discussions of immortality, which seemed to rely on a relatively traditional notion.
Chapter 6, “Vindicating Autonomy: Kant, Sartre, and O’Neill,” contrasts Kant’s notion of autonomy with two serious misconstruals of it, identified by Onora
6 This argument is largely an amplification of an interpretation advanced in my (1982a) and (2000b).
7 These passages parallel others that are cited, with more detail, in a contribution by Klaus Düsing (2018). It was a pleasant and surprising coincidence that Düsing happened to offer his interpretation in a talk given directly after mine at a conference set up by Jörg Noller (among others) in Munich.
O’Neill as “radical existentialism” and “panicky metaphysics.” As O’Neill shows, these misconstruals try to force us to choose between two absurd alternatives: either that, as Iris Murdoch supposed, Kantian ethics is a matter of “anarchy,” or, as others have assumed, it is a matter of mere uniformity and dogmatic obedience. While agreeing with O’Neill about the inappropriateness of these options, I argue that there is also a relatively non-radical form of existentialism that can be identified in Sartre’s work, and that, once numerous very commonly misunderstood aspects of his writing are clarified, his position can be understood as in line with a sensible version of Kantian autonomy. Similarly, I argue that although “panicky” metaphysics should be eschewed, there is still a relatively moderate metaphysical way of understanding some of the key notions (reason, law, and self-legislation) in Kant’s ethics.8
Chapter 7, “Universality, Necessity, and Law in General in Kant,” focuses on clarifying the fundamental Critical meanings of three closely related terms that are essential to understanding Kant’s doctrine of autonomy. I explore these concepts at first mainly in a theoretical and scientific context,9 and note ways in which the crucial strict conception of them in Kant’s system has often been underappreciated. To provide an overview, I offer a systematic taxonomy of the many different ways in which these terms can be employed in the context of the Critical philosophy. I conclude that Kant’s statements about the mind as “lawprescribing” claim neither too much, because they back off from theoretically determining unconditioned things in themselves, nor too little, because their ultimate meaning actually reinforces rather than undercuts the substantive objectivity that they intend.10 Although Kant’s idealism is central to his Critical philosophy, and the theoretical rules that we can determinately use cannot transcend the realm of experience, this does not mean that the very meaning of his notions of universality, necessity, and law is restricted to a merely ideal realm.
Chapter 8, “Prauss and Kant’s Three Unities: Subject, Object, and Subject and Object Together,” explores Kant’s theoretical philosophy further in a contemporary context by offering an overview of some features of the extensive discussions of subjectivity, space, time, and infinity presented in a massive recent volume by the well-known Kant scholar Gerold Prauss. Prauss is mainly concerned here not with Kant exegesis but with giving a systematic account of how, as spontaneous and intuitive subjects in a broadly Kantian sense, we manage to construct a spatial world with very specific a priori constraints. According to Prauss, this occurs in a manner in which each subject, from its one-dimensional temporal point of
8 See also my (2015) and (2016a). 9 See also my (2013).
10 This discussion parallels, and departs only in a very slight way, from an especially clear presentation of similar issues in Watkins (2017a), which was also presented at an Edinburgh conference hosted by Michela Massimi and published in the same volume in which my essay originally appeared. More changes in formulation have been made in this chapter than the others, but none are intended to alter the substance of the argument.
view, forms intentions that generate a tightly structured world of three-dimensional spatial extensions that are always already part of an infinite field, rather than something built up from separate finite pieces, one independent step at a time. Rather than attempting an assessment of the full mathematical and scientific complexity of Prauss’s subtle exposition, Chapter 8 mainly reviews some central themes in the book that relate to Prauss’s earlier work on the fundamental role of our intentional spontaneity, as well as to similar developments in Anglophone Kant scholarship, such as the influence of Strawson and Sellars.11
1.4. Overview of Part II: Successors
Chapter 9, “Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism,” is a response to Stephen Houlgate’s Hegelian critique of Kant’s philosophy. Houlgate’s restatement of this kind of critique very efficiently brings together, in the latest form, many of the stock charges that Hegelians and other post-Kantians have raised about Kant’s alleged subjectivism. It thus provides an ideal opportunity for clarifying how it is that such objections have so frequently arisen, and why it is that Kantians can nonetheless take these charges to rest on misreadings of the Critical philosophy. The core of the Hegelian attack concerns, but is not limited to, objections to the doctrine of transcendental idealism—objections that are hardly limited to the Hegelian tradition but can be resolved, I argue, upon a closer reading of Kant’s texts. To defend Kant from these charges of subjectivism is not, however, to deny that there are other problems with the Critical philosophy, or that there are significant advances, or at least interesting proposals, to be found in the Hegelian program, especially as reformulated by contemporary philosophers.12
Chapter 10, “History, Idealism, and Schelling,” offers a broad overview of Schelling’s extensive concern with history and of how his discussions on this topic are closely related to early writings by Reinhold and Hegel. In one early essay, Schelling seems to deny that a rigorously philosophical treatment of history is possible, insofar as this field appears not to be amenable to Cartesian or Fichtean demands of a strict science. It turns out, however, that the very unpredictability of history, which Schelling stresses here, is a feature that is connected with the special creative and aesthetic significance of historical developments that Schelling’s philosophy eventually values more highly than any quasi-Cartesian or “Identity philosophy” foundational project. A study of several of Schelling’s lesser known later writings reveals that he remains dominated by a lifelong interest in turning the providential dogmas of Christianity into a non-miraculous account of the
11 For a discussion of some of Prauss’s earlier work, see my (1982b) and (1982c).
12 For further discussion of the relation of Kant’s philosophy to Hegel and current interpreters, see Chapters 14 and 15.
general progressive development of religious thinking in broadly naturalistic forms of mythology, culminating with the thought that history is “the revelation of God.” Schelling’s final “positive philosophy” combines this result with a detailed dialectical account of the main stages of earlier philosophy. He applies this essentially retrospective approach to his own development and concludes that the “same philosophy which was Naturphilosophie at an earlier stage here became philosophy of history” (SW [10: 116]).
Chapter 11, “History, Succession, and German Romanticism,” offers an outline and defense of what I take to be the best version of a philosophy of history developed by the post-Kantians. The essay focuses on the famous definition by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel of Romanticism, in their ideal programmatic sense, as “progressive universal poetry.” After assigning a specific philosophical meaning to each of these three key terms, I argue that they provide a useful framework for defining a distinctive Early Romantic conception of history, one that is all at once political, philosophical, and aesthetic in a holistic religious sense. Especially for our late modern age, this conception can be shown to have advantages over merely linear, circular, or chaotic models of history. I take the most impressive version of this conception to be expressed by Hölderlin, whose work can be understood as a further development of the projects of predecessors such as Milton, Kant, and Hölderlin’s own student comrades, Hegel and Schelling. In particular, Hölderlin’s celebrated 1801 poem, “Celebration of Peace” (Friedensfeier), can be understood as a paradigmatic expression of the Early Romantic thought that our philosophical and cultural history is primarily a matter of the influence of a sequence of exemplary geniuses13 who have creatively responded to and gone beyond their major predecessors, from biblical times through Rousseau and after.14 The poem culminates in a picture of the enlightened culture of late modernity as an era that transcends the ancient veneration of mere nature (“thunderstorms”—what Hegel was to call “the parti-colored show of the sensuous immediate”) as well as the medieval fascination with the supernatural (“miracles”—what Hegel called “the dark void of the transcendent and remote super-sensuous”).15 Here Hölderlin (who enthusiastically reported to friends that
13 Cf. Michael Friedman (2001, 67) on “the genius of a Descartes, a Newton, or an Einstein.” Friedman’s analysis of the history of science is similar to my account of the stress on history in post-Kantian philosophy because it also features the phenomenon of a progressive appropriation of one’s predecessors, although it does so in a way that puts more emphasis on the goal of convergence.
14 For one recent account of how controversial the interpretation of this poem is, see Die Zeit (1956). Rather than identifying the “prince of the festival” (Fürst des Festes) in the poem as one particular figure or party, I take Hölderlin to be celebrating the significance for humanity of an extraordinary sequence of exemplary figures, a sequence in which his own work as a writer is meant to occupy a pivotal place.
15 These phrases come from the chapter on “Self-Consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, HW [3: 145], just before the mention of the “spiritual daylight of the present,” and the transition to the discussion of the master/slave relation. In an American context, it may be difficult to believe that poets, philosophers, or literary figures in general could imagine they might have an enlightened
he was devoting his time to reading Kant) appears to be directly alluding to Kant’s rejection of the alternatives of that which is either “veiled in obscurity” or in “the transcendent region.” These terms occur right next to Kant’s famous conclusion of his practical philosophy with a call to reflect on what is directly present in the “starry heavens above” and the “moral law within,” and, above all, on the thought of how they are linked, through the postulates of pure practical reason, in a unified teleological and cosmological vision of nature and history (KpV [5: 161f.]).
Chapter 12, “Hölderlin’s Kantian Path,” presents a more detailed account of Hölderlin’s philosophy as the most sophisticated version of a combination of Kantian and post-Kantian ideas. It offers a reading of the novel Hyperion that takes it to be intended primarily as an evaluation of the main competing aesthetic, moral, and religious answers to the prime question of eighteenth-century German thought, namely, how best to define the vocation of humanity (die Bestimmung des Menschen). Despite decades of fascination with both Hölderlin and Kant, it was only in the last stages of researching this essay that I was led to the surprising discovery of how much Hölderlin’s work can be read as explicitly intended to be, above all, an advocacy of Kant’s moral philosophy.16 It is not generally appreciated that, at the time of Hyperion, Hölderlin’s main aim was to illustrate how a Kantian ethic, properly understood, can incorporate political, aesthetic, and religious concerns in an enlightened way that overcomes the extremes of other treatments of these concerns, such as in the work of Schiller and Fichte.17 Hölderlin believed this position could be not only defended on abstract philosophical grounds but also energetically supported in literature. As an extraordinarily gifted and enlightenment-oriented “poet of the people,” he understandably chose to write in a revolutionary style that he believed would be most effective in motivating people at large to embrace progressive Kantian ideals, and to achieve what he called a “more beautiful than merely bourgeois society.”18 I defend Hölderlin’s version of
impact on culture at large. Nonetheless, the literary/political work of Milton and Rousseau, and the general modern notion of the poet as a revolutionary legislator, had considerable influence throughout the whole era leading to the French Revolution and beyond (for example, in Ireland). The eloquent formulations of the “founding fathers,” and the rhetoric of Lincoln, Whitman, and Martin Luther King have come perhaps closest to playing this kind of role in American society. Some influential but unenlightened tendencies (still far from “spiritual daylight”) that are unfortunately present in Kant’s more popular work are discussed in my (forthcoming a) and (forthcoming c).
16 Just after a draft of this essay was finished, it was heartening to learn, through a tip from Manfred Frank, that recent work by a top Germanist, Friedrich Strack, independently had reached a similar conclusion, namely, that relatively unappreciated letters by Hölderlin demonstrate his deep knowledge of and overriding commitment to Kant’s moral philosophy, including the postulates. See Chapter 12, n. 50.
17 There is added confirmation for this reading in comments in a remarkable discussion of “Hölderlin’s Sorrow,” by René Girard (2009, 120–1): “It is through Hölderlin, and no one else, that we can understand what was happening at Jena in 1806 [. .] Hölderlin is much less haunted by Greece than we have been led to believe. I see him instead as frightened by the return to paganism that infused the classicism of his time.” Thanks to David Dudrick for a reminder on this point.
18 See Franz (2015). This essay offers an excellent account of the complex local political situation surrounding the very early work of Hölderlin and his colleagues.
the Kantian position as superior (because more balanced) even to the ideals of its most significant post-Kantian successors, namely, Hegel’s conception of ethical life, Kierkegaard’s conception of religious life, and Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetic life.
Chapter 13, “On Some Reactions to ‘Kant’s Tragic Problem’,” focuses on a remark by Nietzsche that gives a vivid characterization of the basic trajectory of German philosophy from Kant through the Romantic era and up to his own time: “man longs to be completely truthful [. . .] that is noble [. . .] but we get only to the relative [. .] that is tragic. That is Kant’s problem. Art now acquires an entirely new dignity. The sciences, in contrast are degraded to a degree.” Early German Romantic writers can be understood as also having appreciated “Kant’s problem” in precisely these “tragic” terms. The tragedy here is not a matter of sensory pain or ethical conflict but comes simply from a restrictive theoretical thesis similar to a position held by many nineteenth-century philosophers of science, namely, that our theoretical knowledge cannot make determinations that go beyond phenomena and reach unconditioned things in themselves. In response to this Critical situation, the Early Romantics developed an appropriate way of giving a “new dignity” to art that is compatible with the main features of the elevated, but also objective and disciplined, role that Kant gives to aesthetic values in our appreciation of nature and art.19 To defend this position, I argue against recent broadly Hegelian interpretations of the Romantics that sharply distinguish these writers from Kant or that criticize their position as all too “subjectivist.” I conclude that the Romantics can be understood as combining the best features of Kantianism and Hegelianism: a deep, non-relativist appreciation for modern morality and subjectivity, along with an eye for developing art and philosophy in the context of a creatively interconnected historical process of succession.
Chapter 14, “The Historical Turn and Late Modernity,” contrasts Hegel’s system and the philosophy of the Early Romantics by offering a further account (in part in reaction to the extensive work of Robert Pippin on this era) of their role in relation to the two pivotal claims in my interpretation of post-Kantianism: first, that, with Reinhold and immediately after, a Historical Turn began that has continued to dominate all thought influenced by philosophy in the German tradition; and second, that this post-Kantian era is best characterized, in contrast to the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, as the age of late modernity. The stress on history as well as the stress on lateness are consequences of two fundamental reactions: first, a disenchantment with classical modern forms of philosophy that attempted to model themselves upon, or even provide an independent foundation for, the remarkable achievements of the exact sciences in the Scientific Revolution; and second, a belief that the practical goal of rational
19 On the ultimately objective orientation of Kant’s aesthetics, see my (2003), chs. 12–14, (2016b), and (2017a).
self-determination, as advocated in the main ideas of Rousseau’s work, the ideals of the French Revolution, and the concern with autonomy in Kant’s ethics, is still worthy of the highest attention by philosophy, despite shortcomings in the original main advocacies of this goal. I argue that Hegel’s version of this post-Kantian project, just like the other early Jena systems, remains in part tied down by questionable broadly Cartesian ideals—certainty, necessity, and completeness—inherited from the earlier modern period of philosophy, and that therefore the more tentative, open, and fragmentary approach of the Early Romantic writers provides a better model (and one that is in part closer to what is best in Kant) for continuing the Historical Turn in our own late period of late modernity.20 I conclude by pointing out that Hegelians have tended to neglect Early Romanticism simply because they have falsely assumed that the movement was infected by subjective, nostalgic, reactionary, and basically anti-scientific or anti-philosophic tendencies.
Chapter 15, “Beyond the Living and the Dead: On Post-Kantian Philosophy as Historical Appropriation,” offers another assessment of the contrast between Hegelian and Early Romantic approaches to making an emphasis on history central in philosophical methodology. It notes the recent stress on history by philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Richard Moran, and Raymond Geuss, and it focuses on the work of Robert Brandom in particular as a prime instance of an impressive contemporary appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy. It concludes by criticizing Brandom’s approach, noting that the alternative of Early Romantic thought does not suffer, as Hegelians have assumed, from a rejection of reason (but, on the contrary, has significant similarities with many of Williams’s remarks), and that Brandom’s specific version of Hegelianism, despite its emphasis on the term “autonomy,” cannot do justice to the original and still defensible core Kantian meaning of the notion.
20 In addition to path-breaking work by German scholars, there is a growing philosophical literature in English on the Early Romantics by philosophers such as Frederick Beiser, Richard Eldridge, Jane Kneller, Charles Larmore, Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, and Fred Rush. For further references, see my (2017b).
2 On the Many Senses of “Self-Determination”
2.1. Preliminary Overview
Many a Scylla and Charybdis threatens the navigations of the dutiful Groundwork reader. By focusing on a clarification of some of the very different meanings of “self-determination” in Kant’s work, the following apologetic interpretation seeks to steer a middle path between two extreme but common ways of reacting to the Groundwork’s account of moral self-determination as autonomy. In this case, the “Scylla” objection claims—in view of the “auto” component of Kantian “autonomy”—that to speak of the moral law as rooted in “self-legislation” is to be too ambitious and overly subjective, and to do an injustice to the essentially receptive character of our reason. Here the contention is that Kant misunderstands how reason is a capacity that basically appreciates reasons to act given to the subject by what is outside of it. The contrasting “Charybdis” concern stems from a worry about what can appear to be an overly close connection drawn between morality and freedom as autonomy. Here the critic’s contention is that the “nomos” component of self-determination in the Groundwork is too restrictive, and in a sense overly objective, insofar as it makes our action appear so thoroughly law-oriented that it seems to leave only the options of being forced either by our reason to follow the moral law or by the “natural necessity” of our sensibility to go against it, and thus—in contrast to Kant’s own later work—it does injustice to our faculty of free choice, or at least our ability to act in ways more complex than these two narrow options.
2.2. Vindicating Kantian Self-Determination
2.2.1. On “determination” and Bestimmung
Unlike “autonomy,” the components of “self-determination,” as well as those of its German correlate Selbstbestimmung, are everyday terms in their native languages, and ones that have many similar meanings and ambiguities. The verb bestimmen (“determine”) is used repeatedly in numerous contexts by Kant, and yet, like
casual English speakers, he generally does not bother to make explicit the quite different senses that the term can have.
One basic ambiguity concerns two distinct philosophical senses of “determination,” namely, an epistemological (E) and a causal (C) sense. We can say, in a first, or E sense, that we determine something when—even without having any relevant effect on it—we simply learn something informative about it, for example, when we cognitively determine the fact that a surface appears warm. We can also say, in a second, or C sense, that we determine it when we simply bring about that something beyond our immediate situation is the case, for example, when we causally determine that a surface is warm—even when, in the relevant sense, we may not at all know what we are doing. It can of course also happen that cognitive and causal kinds of determination combine in one complex event; we can come to learn that something is warm in the very act of making it warm. (In English, these meanings are combined in a further sense when we use knowledge in a decisive way to try to bring something about, as when we say, for example, that, “no matter what,” we are “determined to” heat a surface.)
In addition to these basic E and C senses of “determine,” there are, especially for the noun form of the term, what I will call its basic F and N senses, namely a formal or definitional sense,1 as well as a normative sense, one that, for Kant, ultimately is to be understood as having a complex moral and teleological meaning. For example, in the course of determining the composition of a metal, in the E sense of merely finding out some things about it, we may eventually arrive at its determination in the more exact F sense of a formula defining its basic nature.2 (Here the English term has roots in the French verb determiner and the process of fixing a thing’s boundaries and gaining a relevantly complete notion of it.) In Kant’s tradition, the nature of something can, furthermore, be something more than a mere physically defined arrangement, in a broadly mechanical sense, for this nature can need to be understood in terms of an ideal practical form such as, above all, the notion of a moral telos or destiny.
It is this biblical and broadly Lutheran sense that is most relevant when, after J. J. Spalding’s very popular 1748 volume Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 3 Kant and numerous other German philosophers, including especially Fichte, focus on Bestimmung in the N sense of our essential “vocation,” or “calling,” at a species as well as individual level. The term “determination” does not have this normative meaning in English, and thus its relation to the other terms can often get lost in translation, but this sense must always be kept in mind when reading Kant and
1 See e.g., G [4: 461]: “autonomy—as the formal condition under which it alone can be determined.”
2 See e.g., G [4: 436]: “a complete determination (Bestimmung) of all maxims by that formula.”
3 On Spalding’s significance, see e.g., Munzel (2012) and Brandt (2007).
his use of various forms of the term bestimmen, for it is this kind of determination that always is of greatest significance to him.4
Kant’s very early works, such as his 1755 Universal Natural History, go along with the dominant broadly Leibnizian view of his era, which stresses that human beings have a significant normative determination but maintains a compatibilist doctrine of freedom, one that denies absolute free choice. This view distinguishes, as basically a matter of mere degree, our rational essence as human beings with this kind of (merely relative) freedom from the broadly mechanistic nature of lower kinds of beings, while still allowing that, according to a more inclusive meaning of the term “nature,” human beings are thoroughly determined as parts of nature in the E, C, F, and N senses. Although Kant holds to this view throughout his earliest works, he then, after the fundamental revolution in his thinking upon reading Rousseau and achieving philosophical maturity at the age of forty in the early 1760s, adopts a very different conception of the relation of nature and human freedom.5 From that time on, Kant believes that our own nature is unique in having a non-compatibilist Bestimmung in its pure moral vocation, a vocation that cannot be understood as being fulfilled, as Leibnizians and other compatibilists claim, simply by attaining higher degrees of clear representation and consequent power.
2.2.2. On the “self” of Selbstbestimmung
Although the notion of “determination” will be my main focus, it is also necessary to add a few preliminary observations about the “self” component in the complex term “self-determination.” In a Kantian context, it is of course crucial to keep in mind that his use of the word “self” is not limited to ordinary empirical particulars. When he speaks of “simple acts of reason,” that is, our fundamental logical capacities, as being found “in my own self,”6 he clearly has in mind, in part, a general and pure faculty that cannot be explained as the product of empirical actions or capacities. It is then, I believe, an additional—and of course still much disputed—feature of Kant’s ultimate moral metaphysics that it favors affirming that the self (of each of us) has not only a range of pure general capacities (for pure intuiting, pure understanding, pure theoretical and practical reasoning, and even for generating feelings that in part have a pure origin) but also a kind of pure
4 See e.g., G [4: 396], “the true vocation (Bestimmung) of human beings must be to produce a will that is good.”
5 See Ameriks (2012), ch. 1.
6 A xiv: “ich demütig gestehe ich es lediglich mit der Vernunft selbst und ihrem reinen Denken zu tun habe . . . weil ich sie [deren ausführlichen Kenntnis] in mir selbst antreffe . . . alle ihre einfache Handlungen.”
and particular independent form of existence, that is, an immortality conceived of as in itself lacking any sensory qualities, spatial or temporal.7
In addition to these basic empirical and pure senses of “self,” which I take to include substantial as well as functional characterizations, there is a complex reflexive meaning to the term “self” that has a fundamental significance in the context of self-determination.8 To begin with, this reflexive meaning needs to be understood as having at least a threefold structure with implications at both empirical and pure levels of determination (and concerning all E, C, F, and N senses). For Kant, to say that we are self-determined reflexively is to say, at the least, that, at both levels, the self is determined (1) in (or, one could also say, of) itself and (2) by itself as well as (3) for itself.
At the first level, this means that human beings, individually and as a group, are commonly understood to be acting with empirical effects that are in part within them, and that are caused by empirical sources in them, and that exist for the sake of empirical ideals concerning them. Thus, we can speak, as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” But Kant would go on to insist that we speak, in addition, in terms of three parallel forms of pure reflexivity, and thus affirm, at a second level, pure effects, pure causings, and pure ideals—all to be understood as part of our own self-determined existence and not merely a possibility for divine beings.
The mere general or structural feature of reflexivity thus does not by itself capture what Kant takes to be most important about us. That is, the three kinds of Gettysburg empirical reflexivity just listed are by themselves merely empirical, and they could exhaust the capacities of the kind of agents that Kant memorably stigmatizes in terms of the image of a mere “turnspit” (Bratenwender) (KpV [5: 97]). In saying this, he realizes, of course, that even at the empirical level human beings are not literally mechanical turnspits, for, as rational animals, their reflexive acts have a conscious intentionality aimed at complex ideals. But if Kant had lived long enough to hear Lincoln’s threefold reflexive remark about government, and understood all that it was directly saying as a merely empirical statement, presumably he still would have maintained what he says in his 1783 review of Pastor J. H. Schulz’s “well-intentioned” quasi-Leibnizian tract on penal reform, namely, that by itself it still misses our essential (for our Bestimmung) and absolutely pure (in E, C, F, and N senses) freedom to act and to think,9 which is denied
7 See, however, Chapter 5, and Kant’s criticism (Rel [6: 128–9 n.]) of the notion of resurrection.
8 See Prauss (1989) and O’Neill (2013).
9 Here Kant at first calls this a freedom to “always act as if one were free [and such that] this idea also actually produces the deed,” and then he adds that “the understanding is able to determine (bestimmen) one’s judgment in accordance with objective grounds that are always valid,” and hence we must “always admit freedom to think, without which there is no reason” (RevSch [8: 13]). These ways of characterizing the absolute freedom to act and to think are not clearly in line with the best formulations of Kant’s position, but they vividly disclose, in an initial way, the topic that he is most concerned with writing about right at this time. See the end of his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is
