The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction

by Eckart Förster

Eckart Förster has written one of the most important books on German philosophy to have appeared in several decades, important both for the many new things it has to teach us about the history of the "twenty-five years" of philosophy, and for its remarkable contributions to philosophy itself. A truly path-breaking achievement.
--Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago

In this book, a great Kant scholar asks two fundamental questions about the extraordinary period of German philosophy from 1781–1806. Why did Kant claim that he had begun philosophy anew—and why did Hegel think that he had brought it to an end? Eckart Förster's answers are historically cogent and philosophically challenging. They are rooted in the deepest learning yet, at the same time, presented with extraordinary clarity. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy is a masterpiece.
--Michael Rosen, Harvard University

For several years, scholars working in the vibrant field of German Idealism—philosophers, literary critics, historians of science, art historians—have been tensely awaiting the appearance of Förster's major synthetic study of the period. But The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy exceeds even the most extravagant expectations. In its combination of detailed historical and textual reconstruction with penetrating philosophical thought, in its unrivalled perspicuity of presentation, in its narrative drive, Förster's book will reward its readers' engagement in every respect. It is masterful in its command of the work of Kant, Jacobi, Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel. It is moving in its commitment to philosophical reflection of the boldest order. Its clarity is marvelous to behold. No serious student of the period will read this book only once.
--David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Romanticism, Theory, Research

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Jeff Samuelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book, but you need more solid grasp of German philosophy from Kant to Hegel than I currently have to get the most out of it. The chapters on Fichte were especially challenging. I definitely plan to read this again in a few years.

[Nathan Spicer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forster's book is a great history of "German Idealism" but it is not what one usually expects from a work in the history of philosophy. That it is called a "systematic reconstruction" ought to be taken seriously--much of the book is Forster rehearsing and condensing a line of thought from Kant through to Hegel. If you want a profile of every major and minor figure in German philosophy in the late 18th Century, you will not get that here. Instead, you get a thematic overview of what Forster takes to be the central question that starts with Kant and "ends" with Hegel: can philosophy be a science?
The attempts to respond to this question lead us through an interesting rabbit hole of Spinozism (less Spinoza) and dilettante biology and physics. Goethe really shines through as a figure worthy of study, though I am not sure if Forster's work inspired English-language philosophical interest in Goethe like it should have.
What the book excels at philosophically (the history serves as the hand-maiden to the philosophy here, though I admit I always looked forward to the Arial-font "historical excurses") is the way in which it makes German Idealism "relevant" to the ongoing discussions of the very possibility of settling philosophical disputes--what that would look like and what it would mean. Authors who seem obscure are crystal clear so long as one pays attention.
I still for the life of me have no idea what Fichte means by the 'I', though.

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The twenty-five years of philosophy are the years in which philosophy became a science, thereby also arriving at knowledge of itself. Let us look back over the path we have traveled.

Philosophy (metaphysics) claims to be cognition of the world purely on the basis of thought. It thus presupposes non-empirical, but nonetheless veridical reference to objects. In order to investigate whether and in what way such a thing could be possible at all, Kant inaugurates transcendental philosophy, which accordingly abstracts from all given objects in order to consider the human cognitive faculty by itself. Before it had arrived at the results of its investigation, philosophy as a science was not possible (Ch. 1).

This first characterization of transcendental philosophy proves upon reflection to be insufficient. On the one hand, it is not possible for it to abstract from everything that is given, since the objective reality of the categories cannot be demonstrated without an a priori determination of the empirical content of matter. On the other hand, it turns out that the conditions under which a metaphysics of morals is possible are no less in need of explanation than are the conditions that make a metaphysics of nature possible, since the highest principle of morality still requires proof (Ch. 2).

In this way, it becomes necessary to expand transcendental philosophy in two directions. It requires (a) proof of the constructability of the object of outer sense; (b) the discovery and justification of the highest principle of morality. Since in the case of morality objective reference as such is unproblematic, transcendental philosophy must now be defined more broadly as an investigation into the possibility of synthetic propositions a priori (Ch. 3).

With Lessing's assertion that Spinoza's philosophy is the only possible philosophy, a competing alternative to transcendental philosophy arises. For according to Spinoza, the criterion of scientific knowledge is the ability to derive the properties of an object from its essence or proximate cause (scientia intuitiva. (Ch.4)

In the meantime, the integration of morality into transcendental philosophy entails a twofold problem. Since the moral law is to be realized in the sensible world, and since the sensible world is subject to a causal determinism that rules out the existence of purposes, a conflict arises between the legislation of practical reason and that of theoretical reason, which thus appear as disjoint and indeed as incompatible (Ch. 5).

Only in the supersensible substrate of appearances is it possible to unify these two legislations with each other and with a nature that agrees with them, which in turn is necessary if reason is to accord with itself. Contrary to its original conception, transcendental philosophy thus comes to have its foundation in the object of outer sense and the condition of its internal unity in a supersensible substrate (Ch. 6). Moreover, precise consideration of the reflective power of judgment also shows that we are compelled to conceive of the supersensible as something unconditional in which thought and being, what is and what ought to be, mechanism and purpose, are inseparably one.

Although it is a conceptual necessity, Kant continues to insist that the link between the sensible and the supersensible is fundamentally beyond human cognition. In order to prove this, he contrasts the human cognitive faculty with something which, according to him, it is not and cannot be: intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding. In this way, though, he also gives the first precise characterization of these two faculties (Ch. 6).

Yet by doing so, Kant also casts doubt on his own assertion that they are inaccessible to the human mind and that the supersensible is therefore necessarily beyond human cognition: According to Fichte, we realize an intellectual intuition in every single self-intuition of the I; and Goethe sees that he has already realized Kant's intuitive understanding by basing his study of the metamorphosis of plants on it (Ch. 7). From this point on, the question of the knowability of the supersensible takes center stage.

According to Fichte, the essence of the I is that it (a) is what it is only through itself (self-positing); and that it (b) must be what it is for itself (self-consciousness). This, however, entails further that (a') the I knows its being as its deed, and this consciousness of the unity of thought and being is not a receptive intuition, but a produce, an intellectual intuition. And (b') the determinate actions that the supersensible I must perform in order to posit itself can be brought to consciousness step by step and made into objects of cognition. In this way, what was for Kant an unfathomable root in which the sensible and suspensible worlds are united becomes, in the case of the human I, a legitimate object of investigation (Chs. 8, 9).

However, if we must conceive of the supersensible as something unconditional, in which thought and being, spirit and nature are inseparably one, then Fichte's philosophy of freedom is only a first step towards its cognition. Schelling therefore insists on an exposition of nature's origination from the common root (Ch. 9).

Schelling's attempt to base the method of his Naturphilosophie on Fichte's intellectual intuition inevitably leads to the dissolution of intellectual intuition. For in order to employ it for cognition of nature, it would have to be possible to abstract form the subject of intuition in the act of intuition itself. With this step, intuition ceases to be productive, however, and becomes intuitive understanding (Ch. 10).

It was Goethe who elaborated a methodology of intuitive understanding based on Spinoza and Kant. It consists in bringing together related phenomena and grasping them in such a way as to form a whole. In a further step, the transitions between the phenomena must be re-created in thought in order to tell whether the whole was already at work in them or whether the parts are only externally connected. If the former is the case, then an idea becomes accessible to experience as the ideal whole to which the sensible parts owe their existence and their specific character.

Hegel applied this method to philosophy itself in order to achieve philosophical knowledge of the supersensible. Since philosophical consciousness is a consciousness that makes a truth claim, he began by setting up a complete series of such shapes of consciousness in order to make the transitions between them reproducible in thought. (Whether or not the series is in fact complete can be determined only by actually going through and trying to re-produce the transitions one by one.) When the philosophical consciousness of the present now looks back over its past shapes and reproduces the transitions between them in thought, it grasps what it thereby experiences as the knowledge of something that consciousness itself has not produced but merely aided in making visible. This is a self-moving, spiritual content which, although discoverable only in the thinking subject, exists independently of it and is objectively real. In this experience, consciousness apprehends the effects of a supersensible spiritual reality. In this way, it has attained the standpoint of scientia intuitiva(Chs. 12-14).' (373-5)

[Joey Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

Förster gives a bona fide dialectical reconstruction of German Idealism as if it were a singular project of an individual. This is an impressive offering. It expects you to have a relative mastery over the authors in discussion, as well as some of the broader context they found themselves in. Provided one has the requisite background, it reads like a gripping spy thriller of sorts. Granted, if one already has the background, one can pretty much expect to know the conclusion from the beginning in true German Idealist fashion. That does not mean that it is any less gripping, for the manner in which he reconstructs this project demonstrates his mastery over the subject.

That does not mean that Förster does not provide any objectionable moments of interpretation of the authors under consideration. They are ultimately trivial in consideration to the fact that he does offer this systematic reconstruction in a coherent and a dazzlingly consistent fashion. As such, he does not so much as try to offer a rehabilitative account of each author as if he is divining the most charitable reading of each author by intuiting their true intent—rather Förster is presenting German Idealism as if it were the high water mark of an intellectual tradition that is still worth taking seriously. And it is.

Ultimately, his conclusion from entertaining Kant’s 1881 announcement of the beginning of philosophy and Hegel’s announcement of its completion in 1806 is that going beyond our discursive understanding’s grasp on our account of knowledge must itself be mastered before we overcome it. He really thinks that a scientia intuitiva, the very kind of thing that could overcome such a discursive understanding, is possible, and he has painstakingly reconstructed an avenue of pursuing its possibility. Whether or not we can is another story.

[Joshua Centanni]

On idealism. Recommended by JPE.

[Bryce Furlong · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Alex Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love a historical excursus