What do you think?
Rate this book
The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy. The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modern Cartesian the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufklärung , the completion of Kant’s philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism.
Thanks to Frederick C. Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of Kant’s critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present.
Thanks to Frederick C. Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of Kant’s critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present.
410 pages, Paperback
First published April 22, 1987
29 people are currently reading
1055 people want to read
About the author
Frederick C. Beiser
31 books101 followersFrederick C. Beiser, one of the leading scholars of German Idealism, is a Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Prior to joining Syracuse, he was a member of the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington where he received a 1999-2000 NEH Faculty Fellowship. He has also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Harvard and Yale University. Beiser earned his DPhil. degree from Oxford University under the direction of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.
Beiser's first book, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1987) was widely influential in revising the commonly held, but notorious accounts of German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the story of the Spinoza or Pantheism controversy. Consequently, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.
Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th century British philosophy.
Beiser's first book, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1987) was widely influential in revising the commonly held, but notorious accounts of German Idealism. In this book, Beiser sought to reconstruct the background of German Idealism through the narration of the story of the Spinoza or Pantheism controversy. Consequently, a great many figures, whose importance was hardly recognized by the English speaking philosophers, were given their proper due.
Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th century British philosophy.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
July 30, 2019
An incredible book, charting the philosophical conflict of Kantian and post Kantian Philosophy in Germany. Many thinkers discussed are very obscure, and it is good to see them get thorough treatment in English scholarship.
The sections on the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, Reinholds Elementarphilosophie and Maimons critical philosophy were particularly illuminating.
Fantastic read and highly recommended.
The sections on the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, Reinholds Elementarphilosophie and Maimons critical philosophy were particularly illuminating.
Fantastic read and highly recommended.
November 21, 2024
Makes the topic of German Idealism, which can be especially abstract and difficult to digest, incredibly lively and animated. This is thanks to Beiser’s frequent discussions of personalities, petty scholarly squabbles, and insistent reference to the stakes involved. I mean hell, poor Mendelssohn died after getting too heavily involved in the pantheism controversy. But beyond that, and in the grander scheme of things, if metaphysics had collapsed at the hands of Kant then the petit bourgeois circles of Jena and Berlin would have been pretty fucked, as morality and faith (and the implicit submission to Wilhelm II’s state) would have had their justification swept out from under them. That was until the 1800's when a certain someone made their presence felt with everybody's favourite phrase, drum roll please.....
AUFHEBUNG
AUFHEBUNG
AUFHEBUNG
Really worth reading, eminently readable. Get stuck in.
AUFHEBUNG
AUFHEBUNG
AUFHEBUNG
Really worth reading, eminently readable. Get stuck in.
June 4, 2021
A remarkably clear tour of the state of German philosophy between 1781-1794, The Fate of Reason traces some of the most notable controversies, polemics, and problems within philosophy in the aftermath of Kant’s first Kritik. The major problem facing philosophers of this period is the question of the authority of reason itself, that is, whether reason is autonomous or the kind of thing which it is right to base one’s conduct on at all. Major philosophical issues arise from this question, foremost of which is the fact that the authority of reason is not the kind of thing that seems possible to justify through reason alone (for this would be circular). These challenges, as Beiser very lucidly shows, form an important context for the reception of Kantian philosophy, as well as for the transformations within philosophy that make the resuscitation of metaphysics by the later, familiar crop of German idealists (Schelling, and Hegel) seem necessary only twenty-some years after Kant seemed to deal it a fatal blow (yet as I understand it this insistence on a metaphysical reading of the later German idealists is something other commentators will strongly depart from).
The first four chapters set up the major dilemma facing philosophers in light of Hume’s skeptical criticisms, Kant’s critique of metaphysics and his defense of reason, and the apparent disintegration of the rationalist project of Wolff and Leibniz. The first chapter focuses on Johann Georg Hamann’s reaction to the Aufklärung generally and Kant specifically, and especially on Hamann’s interest in historicizing and contextualizing reason along with his insistence on an alternative source of knowledge through the religious dimension of everyday experience (there’s also some very interesting material on Hamann’s prescient philosophy of language). The next three chapters focus on the “pantheism controversy”—a debate between Jacobi and Mendelssohn over the implications of the posthumous revelation of Lessing’s Spinozism. Jacobi uses this revelation (along with Spinoza’s poor reputation in 18th century Germany) to argue that reason, if consistently followed, does not support religion and morality as the Aufklärer claim, but rather undermines it, leading to nihilism, atheism, and skepticism. These conclusions seriously disturb those who argue for the authority and autonomy of reason in no small reason on the basis that it was a much firmer basis for morality and religion than was irrational faith. Jacobi by contrast elevates faith above reason as a source of knowledge, a move that requires a response by those like Mendelssohn and the rationalist tradition generally who are eager to preserve reason’s authority (though they prove not so adept at this). Beiser’s treatment of the reception of Kant by Jacobi and Mendelssohn and Kant’s triangulation with respect to them was especially illuminating.
After a fascinating chapter on the vitalist philosophy of mind of Johann Gottfried Herder—a brilliant, if ultimately flawed attempt to avoid the philosophical difficulties provoked by the close association of reason with mechanical causality—and Kant’s ensuing critique of him via his account of teleology, Beiser gives us two chapters detailing the reception and criticism of Kant’s philosophy among the Popularphilosophen. There are empiricist (Lockean) critics and rationalist (Leibnizian or Wolffian) critics, both of whom are unconvinced by Kant’s synthesis of empiricist and rationalist philosophical elements, but for different reasons. Beiser clearly explains the major objections, where they get Kant wrong and (more rarely) where they spur him to subtly rethink his positions, as well as how these misreadings shaped Kant’s reception in the philosophical world.
The eighth chapter on Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie was also very historically clarifying. As Beiser shows, Kant’s popularization was in no small part due to Reinhold’s explication of Kant’s philosophy as the middle way that resolves the dilemma of a rational nihilism or an irrational fideism. However, not content merely to remain Kant’s popularizer, Reinhold felt that Kant had failed to derive his philosophy convincingly from a single principle, and attempted to rectify this by rebuilding the Kantian system from an analysis of the concept of “representation” (which Reinhold takes to be the starting point of any philosophy). While Reinhold’s theory is unconvincing and at points veers too far from the spirit of the critical philosophy (as his critics are eager to point out), it does seem prescient of later phenomenological philosophical methods.
Finally, Beiser finishes with two philosophers who renew skepticism in light of the critical philosophy. These are Schulze and Maimon, who both put forward a kind of meta-critique of Kant. While Shulze misconstrues Kant by portraying his philosophy as psychologistic—as an investigation into the faculties of the mind—he convincingly argues against this version of Kant and so negatively emphasizes the importance of reading the critical philosopher as a second-order investigation of synthetic a priori judgments. Maimon by contrast gets the second-order nature of transcendental philosophy right, but criticizes Kant for failing to give a convincing account of the interaction between sensibility and the understanding. More intriguingly, Maimon argues that the only way Kant can resolve this is by reintroducing certain metaphysical themes from the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition. Hence Maimon proves an unappreciated link between Kant and the apparently more metaphysically oriented philosophies of Schelling and Hegel.
All in all, I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in German idealism. Beiser is an exceptionally clear writer—a model for intellectual history—and his account is truly a gripping one, adroitly blending biographical, historical, and philosophical content in a form which always remains very readable. The chapters on Herder and Maimon were undoubtedly the highlights for me, but I left feeling I had a much stronger grasp on the historical context and trajectory of German idealism, and many more references to follow up on. I will surely be reading more from Beiser on this topic.
The first four chapters set up the major dilemma facing philosophers in light of Hume’s skeptical criticisms, Kant’s critique of metaphysics and his defense of reason, and the apparent disintegration of the rationalist project of Wolff and Leibniz. The first chapter focuses on Johann Georg Hamann’s reaction to the Aufklärung generally and Kant specifically, and especially on Hamann’s interest in historicizing and contextualizing reason along with his insistence on an alternative source of knowledge through the religious dimension of everyday experience (there’s also some very interesting material on Hamann’s prescient philosophy of language). The next three chapters focus on the “pantheism controversy”—a debate between Jacobi and Mendelssohn over the implications of the posthumous revelation of Lessing’s Spinozism. Jacobi uses this revelation (along with Spinoza’s poor reputation in 18th century Germany) to argue that reason, if consistently followed, does not support religion and morality as the Aufklärer claim, but rather undermines it, leading to nihilism, atheism, and skepticism. These conclusions seriously disturb those who argue for the authority and autonomy of reason in no small reason on the basis that it was a much firmer basis for morality and religion than was irrational faith. Jacobi by contrast elevates faith above reason as a source of knowledge, a move that requires a response by those like Mendelssohn and the rationalist tradition generally who are eager to preserve reason’s authority (though they prove not so adept at this). Beiser’s treatment of the reception of Kant by Jacobi and Mendelssohn and Kant’s triangulation with respect to them was especially illuminating.
After a fascinating chapter on the vitalist philosophy of mind of Johann Gottfried Herder—a brilliant, if ultimately flawed attempt to avoid the philosophical difficulties provoked by the close association of reason with mechanical causality—and Kant’s ensuing critique of him via his account of teleology, Beiser gives us two chapters detailing the reception and criticism of Kant’s philosophy among the Popularphilosophen. There are empiricist (Lockean) critics and rationalist (Leibnizian or Wolffian) critics, both of whom are unconvinced by Kant’s synthesis of empiricist and rationalist philosophical elements, but for different reasons. Beiser clearly explains the major objections, where they get Kant wrong and (more rarely) where they spur him to subtly rethink his positions, as well as how these misreadings shaped Kant’s reception in the philosophical world.
The eighth chapter on Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie was also very historically clarifying. As Beiser shows, Kant’s popularization was in no small part due to Reinhold’s explication of Kant’s philosophy as the middle way that resolves the dilemma of a rational nihilism or an irrational fideism. However, not content merely to remain Kant’s popularizer, Reinhold felt that Kant had failed to derive his philosophy convincingly from a single principle, and attempted to rectify this by rebuilding the Kantian system from an analysis of the concept of “representation” (which Reinhold takes to be the starting point of any philosophy). While Reinhold’s theory is unconvincing and at points veers too far from the spirit of the critical philosophy (as his critics are eager to point out), it does seem prescient of later phenomenological philosophical methods.
Finally, Beiser finishes with two philosophers who renew skepticism in light of the critical philosophy. These are Schulze and Maimon, who both put forward a kind of meta-critique of Kant. While Shulze misconstrues Kant by portraying his philosophy as psychologistic—as an investigation into the faculties of the mind—he convincingly argues against this version of Kant and so negatively emphasizes the importance of reading the critical philosopher as a second-order investigation of synthetic a priori judgments. Maimon by contrast gets the second-order nature of transcendental philosophy right, but criticizes Kant for failing to give a convincing account of the interaction between sensibility and the understanding. More intriguingly, Maimon argues that the only way Kant can resolve this is by reintroducing certain metaphysical themes from the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition. Hence Maimon proves an unappreciated link between Kant and the apparently more metaphysically oriented philosophies of Schelling and Hegel.
All in all, I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in German idealism. Beiser is an exceptionally clear writer—a model for intellectual history—and his account is truly a gripping one, adroitly blending biographical, historical, and philosophical content in a form which always remains very readable. The chapters on Herder and Maimon were undoubtedly the highlights for me, but I left feeling I had a much stronger grasp on the historical context and trajectory of German idealism, and many more references to follow up on. I will surely be reading more from Beiser on this topic.
February 19, 2022
A really wonderful book, it makes debates among obscure 18th century German philosophers come to life. Especially valuable because it seems that many of Kant's contemporaries have not been translated into English.
All philosophies are wrong, but watching them defend themselves, build consensus, and then founder on the shoals of their own contradictions or lacunae is a delight.
You probably need to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before reading this, and maybe his Critique of Practical Reason as well.
All philosophies are wrong, but watching them defend themselves, build consensus, and then founder on the shoals of their own contradictions or lacunae is a delight.
You probably need to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before reading this, and maybe his Critique of Practical Reason as well.
October 28, 2011
This is a remarkably lucid book about ideas that I have always found difficult. I was particularly interested in the chapter on Herder's philosophy of mind and Kant's reaction to Herder's vitalism. By putting Kant in historical context he becomes much more interesting than simply reading about his ideas out of context. Much that he was writing against and much that his critics said are not things that matter much to someone like me. To suggest an analogy: Since we agree that the world is round, reading arguments to that effect are not of much interest unless one can see them in the context of arguments for the world being flat. This is a very thorough book and I must confess I didn't make it through all the chapters on Kant's critics. I will read more of Beiser's work. He is a great guide to difficult ideas.
August 29, 2019
A very enjoyable and lucid look at Kant’s critical philosophy and it’s interpreters and critics. I was not aware of many of the individuals involved or the controversies before this. I will definitely be reading more by this author and on this subject.
July 8, 2018
This book fills a lacuna in the history of philosophy at the end of the 18th Century. Kant's influence was predominant in German philosophy during that period, obscuring other figures who motivated him through criticism, made explicit internal contradiction of the critical philosophy, or foreshadowed the development of idealism after Kant. Significant among them were Hamann, Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Herder, Eberhard, Reinhold and Maimon. This book gives a careful examination on each of them, pointing out their historical significance as well as summarizing the ways they contributed to the disputes.
There are two clues that lead throughout the book. The first is the crisis of the authority of reason at the decline of the German Aufklärung. The harmony between reason and morality/religion, the autonomy, impartiality and universality of reason, were all under serious doubt. The second and more concrete clue is the pantheism controversy initiated by Jacobi and Mendelssohn and participated by almost all the figures at the time. Through a disclosure of Lessing's Spinozism, Jacobi argued that reason, when followed consistently, necessarily leads to fatalism and atheism. There is no way to be loyal to reason while retaining values of morality, religion and the state. A diachotomy was posited between rational nihilism and irrational fidelism.
The role Kant played in the story was interesting. Though his critical philosophy deserves a significant place in the pantheon of philosophy, Kant's fame was largely due to Reinhold's popularizing interpretation of him as providing a solution to the aporia created by the pantheism controversy. Kant's critical notion of reason (distanced from Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism) and especially his prioritization of practical over theoretical reason seemed to provide a third path apart from Jacobi's dilemma. Because obligations of practical reason necessitate the regulative ideas of freedom, God and immortality of the soul, Kant proves their validity without relying on metaphysical arguments, which were losing their credit under Hamann, Jacobi and Herder's attack.
But the solution Kant gave soon appeared problematic as well. Attacks came from Lockeans and Wolffians, but more fatally from Reinhold, Schulze and Maimon, who maintained that Kant's critical philosophy failed to fulfill its own aims. Criticism thus turned into meta-criticism, and philosophy was profoundly transformed from a first-order inquiry of epistemological processes into a second-order examination of transcendental concepts of reason, which was crucial to the transition from Kant to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
The merits of this book are various. First, Frederick Beiser knows how to extract from intricate materials a clear account of a certain philosopher's ideas, with an emphasis on his agreements and disagreements with others. This is a gift for a book that deals with some 30 figures within 300 pages. The reader never finds herself lost in details of those disputes, but is always guided with a synoptic view on the main issue.
Second, the book impressively contextualizes Kant's philosophy and its development. Most of Kant's ideas are revealed to have been responses to others, though the pivotal conception of a transcendental philosophy was undoubtedly revolutionary - something more revolutionary than Kant the man. Beiser neither trivializes Kant's thought as a melange of his contemporaries', nor detaches him from them, rendering Kant's breakthroughs rootless. Rather, Beiser knows well that the best way to depict a great philosopher is to place him back in his time and then to show the timelessness of his thoughts.
Third, the book also serves as a valuable documentation of those supposedly "minor" figures at the period. Though they seemed to be largely trapped in their Zeitgeist, lots of their ideas, given proper interpretation, are astonishingly close to what we find in 19th and 20th Century philosophy. For example, Hamann and Herder's philosophy of language already suggests a conceptual analysis; Reinhold's theory of representation is structurally reminiscent of Husserl's discussion of intentionality, and Maimon's idea of an infinite struggle of understanding foreshadows Lacan's conception of the dynamics of the Real. This does not mean, of course, that 19th and 20th Century philosophies have nothing new. However, once we recognize those purportedly "novel" ideas in the history of philosophy, we become less blind to their connection to other ideas as well as the difficulties intrinsic to them. Indeed, most philosophers today are much more ignorant of such difficulties than their 18th Century precedents.
Having gone through the extremely productive years from 1781 to 1793, the book curiously stops before introducing Fichte. The rest of the story, which is largely a revival of metaphysics in the face of meta-criticism, constitutes the theme of Beiser's another book, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 .
There are two clues that lead throughout the book. The first is the crisis of the authority of reason at the decline of the German Aufklärung. The harmony between reason and morality/religion, the autonomy, impartiality and universality of reason, were all under serious doubt. The second and more concrete clue is the pantheism controversy initiated by Jacobi and Mendelssohn and participated by almost all the figures at the time. Through a disclosure of Lessing's Spinozism, Jacobi argued that reason, when followed consistently, necessarily leads to fatalism and atheism. There is no way to be loyal to reason while retaining values of morality, religion and the state. A diachotomy was posited between rational nihilism and irrational fidelism.
The role Kant played in the story was interesting. Though his critical philosophy deserves a significant place in the pantheon of philosophy, Kant's fame was largely due to Reinhold's popularizing interpretation of him as providing a solution to the aporia created by the pantheism controversy. Kant's critical notion of reason (distanced from Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism) and especially his prioritization of practical over theoretical reason seemed to provide a third path apart from Jacobi's dilemma. Because obligations of practical reason necessitate the regulative ideas of freedom, God and immortality of the soul, Kant proves their validity without relying on metaphysical arguments, which were losing their credit under Hamann, Jacobi and Herder's attack.
But the solution Kant gave soon appeared problematic as well. Attacks came from Lockeans and Wolffians, but more fatally from Reinhold, Schulze and Maimon, who maintained that Kant's critical philosophy failed to fulfill its own aims. Criticism thus turned into meta-criticism, and philosophy was profoundly transformed from a first-order inquiry of epistemological processes into a second-order examination of transcendental concepts of reason, which was crucial to the transition from Kant to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
The merits of this book are various. First, Frederick Beiser knows how to extract from intricate materials a clear account of a certain philosopher's ideas, with an emphasis on his agreements and disagreements with others. This is a gift for a book that deals with some 30 figures within 300 pages. The reader never finds herself lost in details of those disputes, but is always guided with a synoptic view on the main issue.
Second, the book impressively contextualizes Kant's philosophy and its development. Most of Kant's ideas are revealed to have been responses to others, though the pivotal conception of a transcendental philosophy was undoubtedly revolutionary - something more revolutionary than Kant the man. Beiser neither trivializes Kant's thought as a melange of his contemporaries', nor detaches him from them, rendering Kant's breakthroughs rootless. Rather, Beiser knows well that the best way to depict a great philosopher is to place him back in his time and then to show the timelessness of his thoughts.
Third, the book also serves as a valuable documentation of those supposedly "minor" figures at the period. Though they seemed to be largely trapped in their Zeitgeist, lots of their ideas, given proper interpretation, are astonishingly close to what we find in 19th and 20th Century philosophy. For example, Hamann and Herder's philosophy of language already suggests a conceptual analysis; Reinhold's theory of representation is structurally reminiscent of Husserl's discussion of intentionality, and Maimon's idea of an infinite struggle of understanding foreshadows Lacan's conception of the dynamics of the Real. This does not mean, of course, that 19th and 20th Century philosophies have nothing new. However, once we recognize those purportedly "novel" ideas in the history of philosophy, we become less blind to their connection to other ideas as well as the difficulties intrinsic to them. Indeed, most philosophers today are much more ignorant of such difficulties than their 18th Century precedents.
Having gone through the extremely productive years from 1781 to 1793, the book curiously stops before introducing Fichte. The rest of the story, which is largely a revival of metaphysics in the face of meta-criticism, constitutes the theme of Beiser's another book, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 .
June 2, 2021
Beiser is amazing.
June 9, 2017
The philosophers at the turn of the 18th century were at a turning point. The Enlightenment had enshrined reason as the as the fundamental article of faith. “Reason could criticize all our beliefs; it could justify morality, religion, and the state; it was universal and impartial; and it could, in theory, explain everything in nature.”
Today, we deal with a lot of consequences of the Enlightenment. Science has a say in absolutely everything. We use it to justify the food we eat (diets, the food pyramid), government policy (global warming being the most noted), and even things that were considered at one point beyond science’s reach. There are some major differences now though. For instance, we no longer take a scientific justification of God quite as seriously as they did back then. Most people don’t even know what the term metaphysics even means.
But the turn of the century was also a turn of thought. The authority of reason was questioned: “Why should I listen to reason? What reason do I have to obey it? We demand that a person’s beliefs and actions be rational; to say that they are irrational is to condemn them. But why do we make such a demand? What is the justification for it? Or, in short, whence is the authority of reason?”
These are big questions, and this book is an excellent introduction. Many of these issues are still issues fought over and discussed today.
One of my favorite questions discussed was between the rationalists and the fideists. The rationalists believed that reason could justify morality, religion, and the state. Fideists believed that if you took reason seriously and followed it to its logical conclusion, it would undermine all three; hence, a reliance on something outside of reason to justify belief in God and all that follows.
I was also introduced to dogmatism (introducing a priori concepts and principles without justifying them. It isn’t just religions guilty of this. Scientists have their own dogmas today), skepticism (the idea that you can’t really know anything), criticism, and empiricism.
This book did a great job of mixing biography with philosophy, so you got the ideas and some of the background of the people who had them. I do wish it had explained a little more of the concepts for the reader new to philosophy. I left not knowing exactly what regulative versus constitutive meant. I was able to look up some things like the law of contradiction, but it looks like I’ll need to find a starter book in philosophy if I really want to get serious.
Big names that are used as background are Locke, Leibniz, and Spinoza. Some of the main philosophers discussed are lesser known, but are indeed important: Jacobi, Kant, Herder, Hamann, Schulze, Reinold, and Maimon.
Today, we deal with a lot of consequences of the Enlightenment. Science has a say in absolutely everything. We use it to justify the food we eat (diets, the food pyramid), government policy (global warming being the most noted), and even things that were considered at one point beyond science’s reach. There are some major differences now though. For instance, we no longer take a scientific justification of God quite as seriously as they did back then. Most people don’t even know what the term metaphysics even means.
But the turn of the century was also a turn of thought. The authority of reason was questioned: “Why should I listen to reason? What reason do I have to obey it? We demand that a person’s beliefs and actions be rational; to say that they are irrational is to condemn them. But why do we make such a demand? What is the justification for it? Or, in short, whence is the authority of reason?”
These are big questions, and this book is an excellent introduction. Many of these issues are still issues fought over and discussed today.
One of my favorite questions discussed was between the rationalists and the fideists. The rationalists believed that reason could justify morality, religion, and the state. Fideists believed that if you took reason seriously and followed it to its logical conclusion, it would undermine all three; hence, a reliance on something outside of reason to justify belief in God and all that follows.
I was also introduced to dogmatism (introducing a priori concepts and principles without justifying them. It isn’t just religions guilty of this. Scientists have their own dogmas today), skepticism (the idea that you can’t really know anything), criticism, and empiricism.
This book did a great job of mixing biography with philosophy, so you got the ideas and some of the background of the people who had them. I do wish it had explained a little more of the concepts for the reader new to philosophy. I left not knowing exactly what regulative versus constitutive meant. I was able to look up some things like the law of contradiction, but it looks like I’ll need to find a starter book in philosophy if I really want to get serious.
Big names that are used as background are Locke, Leibniz, and Spinoza. Some of the main philosophers discussed are lesser known, but are indeed important: Jacobi, Kant, Herder, Hamann, Schulze, Reinold, and Maimon.
September 24, 2024
An indispensable guide to the early reception, criticism, and evolution of Kant's thought, "The Fate of Reason" is now rightly regarded as a classic. It is the first of Frederick Beiser's numerous, highly acclaimed works on German philosophy, and it will probably continue to be read and appreciated well into this century, I should think. Beiser currently (as of 2024) teaches philosophy at Syracuse and was formerly at Indiana. His Doktorvaters at Oxford were heavy hitters Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin.
The subtitle of this book gives the confines of the period studied within: "from Kant to Fichte," that is, from Hamann's original darts thrown at the pre-critical Kant in the 1760s, though becoming more substantial with his "meta-critique" of Kant's First Critique in the 1780s, and then coming to a close with Salomon Maimon's work in the 1790s, just before Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel come on the scene.
Beiser carefully considers how a number of actors dealt with reason in their systems (or, in the case of Hamann, non-systems).
J G Hamann and F H Jacobi belong together and they are labeled as "fideists" or "irrationalists," though neither description is entirely accurate. These two religious thinkers believed that reason worked along with faith and man's imagination, memory, and intellect. They tended to be anti-metaphysical (like Kant) and more empirical (unlike Kant), recognizing with Aristotle that all human knowledge begins with what the senses receive from external objects. Jacobi engaged in the so-called Pantheism Controversy with Mendelssohn ostensibly over the question of Lessing's Spinozism, but ultimately over the possibility that rational philosophy, pursued to its final end, leads to atheism, immorality, and nihilism. Hamann's theological aesthetic gave rise to the Sturm und Drang movement, which Kant dismissed as mere scwärmerei. This movement eventually gives birth to German romanticism.
The author paints Moses Mendelssohn as a bit of an out-of-date rationalist, throwing up last ditch defenses of reason and natural theology in front of the oncoming invasion of the transcendental philosophy and the schwärmerei of men like Hamann and Jacobi. In attempting to 'save' the doctrines of God and morality, Mendelssohn falls back on older principles that put him out of touch with Kant. In the end, the Pantheism Controversy with Jacobi led to his demise, both intellectually and, perhaps, literally.
J G Herder's vitalism and Spinozistic conception of God were trailblazing. His views on the organic development of history, language, and the mind were highly original, exerting an influence especially on Goethe and Schiller. Yet, Herder's philosophy was ultimately foreign to Kant's project, and the bachelor-philosopher did not integrate any of Herder into his Critique.
Then we meet very many minor figures from the decade of the 1780s almost completely forgotten today: the host of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalists and Lockean Empiricists (or "popular philosophers") from the major German universities, all of whom attacked Kant either for being too empirical and Humean or for being too rationalist and Wolffian. For the Wolffians smelled Hume's skepticism in Kant and feared that his system would remove all rationalist philosophical structures from thought which shored up morality, provided the basis for law, and proved the existence of God, while the Lockeans sensed the tendency toward solipsism and nihilism in Kant's thought, a "second-order philosophy" which did not deal with reality and the world, but mainly with things going on in one's own head. Beiser tells the interesting tales of these men and their specific arguments against the First Critique.
Beiser also tells us the tale of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the brilliant expositor of the First Critique, whose "Letters" on Kantian philosophy popularized it and perhaps even saved it from the forgotten rubbish heap of philosophical authorship. Yet, from disciple Reinhold eventually became critic and then even enemy of his master. Reinhold's desire was to establish the transcendental philosophy upon a single, irrefutable point - a foundation stone from which all other arguments and conclusions would follow. For him, this was a theory of representation - essentially a phenomenological reduction to the conditions of experience; Reinhold wished to found synthetic a prior principles upon the 'fact' that a representation occurs when a subject and object have an interaction. However, as many other early critics pointed out, Reinhold's entire project is rife with ambiguities and commits petitio principii from the start, for the very notions of subject and object or some kind of active giving and passive reception violate Hume's warnings regarding causality. It is interesting that Reinhold is the first to reduce philosophy to epistemology, or at least to make the argument that all philosophy is epistemology in the end, and that he might be considered the father of all phenomenology, for his argument that one's starting point must be receptivity of phenomena (n.b., not doubt or self knowledge, as with Descartes).
Then, in the final chapter we meet the strange and original Salomon Maimon, the Lithuanian Jewish philosopher who befriended the enlighteners in Berlin and wrote brilliant, penetrating reviews of Kant's critiques. Maimon essentially demonstrated how most of Kant criticism gets Kant completely wrong for thinking that his system is ultimately about deducing what the world is. It's not, as Maimon shows, because it's about qualifying and understanding our deductions about the world. It is, in fact, second-order and not first-order philosophy. Kant's system does not have anything to tell us about the substance of that person over there (metaphysics) or how I know she is there (epistemology) or the fact of the love I feel in my heart for her (schwärmerei or physiology). Rather, Kant might help us understand how it is our mind categorizes and labels these appearances. About the noumena, Kant cannot help us and dare not help us; critics fall into error when they either think Kant disbelieves in noumena (Berkeleyian idealism) or when they think he's trying to prove something about our knowledge of them (epistemology).
Maimon's main point, which leads the way to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is that all experience and perception must be part of an infinite mind stretching out to each individual perceiver. Only this overcomes the aporia of the transcendental philosophy, saving it in the end (or so Maimon thinks). But, ironically, this is also what paves the way for the overcoming of Kant by the Romantics and the eventual flourishing of the Idealists in the end.
The subtitle of this book gives the confines of the period studied within: "from Kant to Fichte," that is, from Hamann's original darts thrown at the pre-critical Kant in the 1760s, though becoming more substantial with his "meta-critique" of Kant's First Critique in the 1780s, and then coming to a close with Salomon Maimon's work in the 1790s, just before Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel come on the scene.
Beiser carefully considers how a number of actors dealt with reason in their systems (or, in the case of Hamann, non-systems).
J G Hamann and F H Jacobi belong together and they are labeled as "fideists" or "irrationalists," though neither description is entirely accurate. These two religious thinkers believed that reason worked along with faith and man's imagination, memory, and intellect. They tended to be anti-metaphysical (like Kant) and more empirical (unlike Kant), recognizing with Aristotle that all human knowledge begins with what the senses receive from external objects. Jacobi engaged in the so-called Pantheism Controversy with Mendelssohn ostensibly over the question of Lessing's Spinozism, but ultimately over the possibility that rational philosophy, pursued to its final end, leads to atheism, immorality, and nihilism. Hamann's theological aesthetic gave rise to the Sturm und Drang movement, which Kant dismissed as mere scwärmerei. This movement eventually gives birth to German romanticism.
The author paints Moses Mendelssohn as a bit of an out-of-date rationalist, throwing up last ditch defenses of reason and natural theology in front of the oncoming invasion of the transcendental philosophy and the schwärmerei of men like Hamann and Jacobi. In attempting to 'save' the doctrines of God and morality, Mendelssohn falls back on older principles that put him out of touch with Kant. In the end, the Pantheism Controversy with Jacobi led to his demise, both intellectually and, perhaps, literally.
J G Herder's vitalism and Spinozistic conception of God were trailblazing. His views on the organic development of history, language, and the mind were highly original, exerting an influence especially on Goethe and Schiller. Yet, Herder's philosophy was ultimately foreign to Kant's project, and the bachelor-philosopher did not integrate any of Herder into his Critique.
Then we meet very many minor figures from the decade of the 1780s almost completely forgotten today: the host of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalists and Lockean Empiricists (or "popular philosophers") from the major German universities, all of whom attacked Kant either for being too empirical and Humean or for being too rationalist and Wolffian. For the Wolffians smelled Hume's skepticism in Kant and feared that his system would remove all rationalist philosophical structures from thought which shored up morality, provided the basis for law, and proved the existence of God, while the Lockeans sensed the tendency toward solipsism and nihilism in Kant's thought, a "second-order philosophy" which did not deal with reality and the world, but mainly with things going on in one's own head. Beiser tells the interesting tales of these men and their specific arguments against the First Critique.
Beiser also tells us the tale of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the brilliant expositor of the First Critique, whose "Letters" on Kantian philosophy popularized it and perhaps even saved it from the forgotten rubbish heap of philosophical authorship. Yet, from disciple Reinhold eventually became critic and then even enemy of his master. Reinhold's desire was to establish the transcendental philosophy upon a single, irrefutable point - a foundation stone from which all other arguments and conclusions would follow. For him, this was a theory of representation - essentially a phenomenological reduction to the conditions of experience; Reinhold wished to found synthetic a prior principles upon the 'fact' that a representation occurs when a subject and object have an interaction. However, as many other early critics pointed out, Reinhold's entire project is rife with ambiguities and commits petitio principii from the start, for the very notions of subject and object or some kind of active giving and passive reception violate Hume's warnings regarding causality. It is interesting that Reinhold is the first to reduce philosophy to epistemology, or at least to make the argument that all philosophy is epistemology in the end, and that he might be considered the father of all phenomenology, for his argument that one's starting point must be receptivity of phenomena (n.b., not doubt or self knowledge, as with Descartes).
Then, in the final chapter we meet the strange and original Salomon Maimon, the Lithuanian Jewish philosopher who befriended the enlighteners in Berlin and wrote brilliant, penetrating reviews of Kant's critiques. Maimon essentially demonstrated how most of Kant criticism gets Kant completely wrong for thinking that his system is ultimately about deducing what the world is. It's not, as Maimon shows, because it's about qualifying and understanding our deductions about the world. It is, in fact, second-order and not first-order philosophy. Kant's system does not have anything to tell us about the substance of that person over there (metaphysics) or how I know she is there (epistemology) or the fact of the love I feel in my heart for her (schwärmerei or physiology). Rather, Kant might help us understand how it is our mind categorizes and labels these appearances. About the noumena, Kant cannot help us and dare not help us; critics fall into error when they either think Kant disbelieves in noumena (Berkeleyian idealism) or when they think he's trying to prove something about our knowledge of them (epistemology).
Maimon's main point, which leads the way to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is that all experience and perception must be part of an infinite mind stretching out to each individual perceiver. Only this overcomes the aporia of the transcendental philosophy, saving it in the end (or so Maimon thinks). But, ironically, this is also what paves the way for the overcoming of Kant by the Romantics and the eventual flourishing of the Idealists in the end.
December 31, 2010
Beiser gives an excellent history of Early German Romanticism and its response to Kant's critical project in this text. He develops a compelling story, particularly with the genius of the Sturm und Drang movement within Germany led by Jacobi and the early Kantian response led by Schiller and picked up by Fichte. An accessible and interesting read.
August 20, 2009
Excellent in showing how German philosophers came to doubt the Enlightenment's guiding principle - the autonomous authority of reason - and how their attempts to salvage it served as a starting point for nineteenth-century German idealism.
December 8, 2008
A classic guide to German philosophy in the late eighteenth century.
October 14, 2025
I didn't finish reading this because I do not have the time for it yet, and I didn't want to get into Fichte yet.
This was such a good explanation of the historical period of German Idealism and Romanticism, I really enjoyed it. Oh to be Goethe in the middle of a fight between Jacobi and Lessing, oh to be Mendelssohn defending Reason, to be in the Aufklarung. It's so cute that both sides of the Pantheism Controversy saw Kant as their ally.
I love Mendelssohn's reply to Kant: if metaphysics is speculative, is it necessarily avoidable?
"What is this figure of reason that so blithely settles the conflicts between speculation and common sense? If it is a faculty of criticism, a faculty that demands to know the reasons for our beliefs, then it amounts to nothing more than speculation. If, however, it is an intuitive faculty, a faculty that judges all issues according to "a natural light," then it is little more than common sense."
This was such a fun read.
I need to read "Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientiren?"
This was such a good explanation of the historical period of German Idealism and Romanticism, I really enjoyed it. Oh to be Goethe in the middle of a fight between Jacobi and Lessing, oh to be Mendelssohn defending Reason, to be in the Aufklarung. It's so cute that both sides of the Pantheism Controversy saw Kant as their ally.
I love Mendelssohn's reply to Kant: if metaphysics is speculative, is it necessarily avoidable?
"What is this figure of reason that so blithely settles the conflicts between speculation and common sense? If it is a faculty of criticism, a faculty that demands to know the reasons for our beliefs, then it amounts to nothing more than speculation. If, however, it is an intuitive faculty, a faculty that judges all issues according to "a natural light," then it is little more than common sense."
This was such a fun read.
I need to read "Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientiren?"
February 10, 2023
All I can say is : An unbelievable and exemplary tour de force of intellectual history that should be read by anyone with an interest in the Enlightenment, Storm Und Drang, Idealism and Romanticism as it narrates an often important but ignored chapter in the history of philosophy.
Mind you though this book (according to Beiser himself in : Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800) is a sort of first volume and the aforementioned book is the second one and needs to be read after in order to continue the story.
Mind you though this book (according to Beiser himself in : Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800) is a sort of first volume and the aforementioned book is the second one and needs to be read after in order to continue the story.
July 21, 2024
This is a detailed account of German philosophy in the 1790s; it involves the philosophical conflict of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and its various attacks and defences. I appreciated that many of the thinkers discussed are obscure. I was especially pleased to see that Johann Georg Hamann was (re-) introduced into the Anglo-American philosophical world. The pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, Reinholds Elementarphilosophie and the unusual angle of Maimons critical philosophy interested me too. A detailed account by an amazing author.
January 10, 2022
Praise for this book is not exaggerated.
March 26, 2023
"The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte" is a book by Frederick Beiser that explores the development of German philosophy from the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). Beiser examines the intellectual landscape of this period, its social and political contexts, and the central ideas of its major thinkers.
The book discusses how the Enlightenment and the subsequent Romantic movement shaped the development of German philosophy, particularly with regards to the idea of reason. Beiser argues that the German philosophical tradition developed in response to the tension between two opposing views of reason: a rationalist view that emphasized the power of reason to grasp truth and a romantic view that emphasized the limitations of reason and the importance of feeling and intuition.
Beiser analyzes the work of major German philosophers, such as Kant, Schiller, Herder, Schelling, and Fichte, and traces the evolution of their ideas as they responded to the intellectual and social challenges of their time. He argues that the fate of reason in German philosophy was not predetermined, but was instead the result of a complex interplay between intellectual and social forces.
Overall, "The Fate of Reason" provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the development of German philosophy during a crucial period in its history, and sheds light on the ongoing debates about the nature and role of reason in contemporary philosophy.
GPT
The book discusses how the Enlightenment and the subsequent Romantic movement shaped the development of German philosophy, particularly with regards to the idea of reason. Beiser argues that the German philosophical tradition developed in response to the tension between two opposing views of reason: a rationalist view that emphasized the power of reason to grasp truth and a romantic view that emphasized the limitations of reason and the importance of feeling and intuition.
Beiser analyzes the work of major German philosophers, such as Kant, Schiller, Herder, Schelling, and Fichte, and traces the evolution of their ideas as they responded to the intellectual and social challenges of their time. He argues that the fate of reason in German philosophy was not predetermined, but was instead the result of a complex interplay between intellectual and social forces.
Overall, "The Fate of Reason" provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the development of German philosophy during a crucial period in its history, and sheds light on the ongoing debates about the nature and role of reason in contemporary philosophy.
GPT
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews