Status Updates From The History of Continental ...

...but to a philosophy that opens itself to history and transformation.’

‘Thinkers such as Bakunin, Burckhardt, Engels, Feuerbach, Humboldt, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Ranke were unified in rejecting Schelling’s dark theolo- gizing. At the same time, they absorbed his implicit materialism, internalized his critique of Hegel, and understood this much of his distinction between “negative philosophy” and “positive philosophy”: the future belongs not to the philosophy of the concept, but to...

‘While Schelling is often presented as if he simply shifted his attention away from nature to the realm of freedom, nothing could be further from the truth. As has been emphasized already, his concern was not simply to think through the possibility of freedom, but to understand that freedom in its finitude – as a specifically human freedom.’

...difficult and yet most characteristic thought: the barbaric principle of nature must itself be comprehended as something contained within God, as the ground of his very possibility.’

‘Behind the cheerful Neoplatonist lurks the tormented Gnostic. If the Aristotelian God is lost in repose, then the God of this universe is something – or someone – else entirely. If nature, contained in God, is the holy and the beautiful, then that same nature, cast forth from God, is the horrific. This thought, shattering enough in itself is merely the prelude for Schelling’s most difficult and yet most...

...and most impressive blossoming of Neoplatonism in the history of Western thought.’

‘...the “night in which all cows are black” has to be read in light of the fact that the system [Hegel] ridicules is one he initially shared with Schelling. Indeed, the very phrase he used had been coined by Schelling, in order to indicate that identity is so far from being a “black night” that it contains within it the full dynamism of nature and spirit. It [Schelling’s system] represents, moreover, the final and...

...It represents, moreover, the final and most impressive blossoming of Neoplatonism in the history of Western thought.’

‘...the “night in which all cows are black” has to be read in light of the fact that the system he ridicules is one he initially shared with Schelling. Indeed, the very phrase he used had been coined by Schelling, in order to indicate that identity is so far from being a “black night” that it contains within it the full dynamism of nature and spirit. It represents, moreover, the final and most impressive blossoming..

‘Schelling assumes that the universe exists in order to express its primordial productivity by giving birth to life – something that it does over and over, and on the most disparate planets and in the most disparate times.
Two centuries earlier, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for such ideas.’

‘Championed (most persuasively by Manfred Frank) as the philosopher of radical freedom, a kind of early-nineteenth-century predecessor of Sartre, Schelling’s real endeavor was somewhat different: to understand freedom in its finitude – and this means in its relationship to nature. This is what separated him first from Fichte and later from Hegel.’

...Michelangelo, Raphael, Boehme, Luther, Bruno, Spinoza, Baader, Bengel, Georg Creuzer, Fichte, Goethe, Hamann, Hegel, Hölderlin, Jacobi, Kant, Kielmeyer, Leibniz, Lessing, Novalis, Oetinger, Schiller, Arthur Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Swedenborg, and Vico (by way of Herder).’

Awesome.

‘Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was educated at the theological seminary at the University of Tübingen (1790–95), receiving his doctorate in 1795; and went on to postgraduate study in natural science, mathematics, and medicine at the University of Leipzig...His influences included the Upanishads, the Bible, Lao Tsu, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kabbalah Writings, Aquinas, Dante, Eckhart...

‘For Fichte, “mine” and “yours” are determinate, reciprocal concepts, and the mass or community of rational beings is a condition of such determinacy, reciprocity, and individuation. That is a stronger claim, and I would submit a more defensible claim than Husserl is able to make. But it requires abandoning the first-person transcendental subject.‘

‘The central problem is: How does consciousness transcend itself? “One can summarize the entire task of the Wissenschaftslehre in this single question: How does the I manage to go outside of itself?” The Aufforderung by other seems to propose a solution to this question – but only from the perspective of ordinary consciousness.

‘The philosopher, qua human being, inhabits the life-world and lives in the natural attitude. The philosophical standpoint is not a life-world standpoint, but a deliberately and artificially sustained one.‘

‘In his second introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre in 1797, Fichte distinguishes between the standpoint of life and the standpoint of the philosopher. This distinction corresponds roughly to the Husserlian distinction between Lebenswelt and the standpoint of transcendental philosophical reflection.’

‘Fortunately the Cartesian Meditations is not Husserl’s only attempt, and probably his least successful attempt, to present an account of intersubjectivity. In his posthumously published studies on intersubjectivity, Husserl’s approach is through an analysis of empathy, Einfühling, Mitgefühl. See Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955).

‘Paul Ricoeur tends to treat appresentation as an argument from analogy (see Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology,126–7). He acknowledges that it becomes transformed into something more, to wit, a transfer into another life in imagination and in sympathy (ibid.,129). However, Husserl flatly denies that is an argument from analogy or inference; see Cartesian Meditations, 111.’

‘From his early writings to his late Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl sought to show that positivism decapitates reason and suppresses the fundamental problems of reason.‘

‘But what would transcendental explanation of recognition and the other look like? Addressing this issue, Fichte takes up the question of the other and not only explores issues that anticipate Husserl, but maintains views that, with one exception, are strikingly similar.’

....Neither can recognize the other, if both do not reciprocally recognize each other, and neither can treat the other as a free being if both do not reciprocally treat each other with respect.”’

Hmm, shades of Buber?

‘Fichte insists that “the human being (and so all finite beings generally) becomes human only among others. Self and other stand in a relation of potential reci- procity.” This relation he calls recognition: “The relation of free beings to each other is therefore a relation of reciprocity through intelligence and freedom. Neither can recognize the other, if both do not reciprocally recognize each other...

‘Johann Gottlieb Fichte was among the first to identify the other as a philosophical problem.’

‘In what follows, we take up Fichte’s question, and show how Fichte’s struggles with this question both anticipate the later philosophy of Edmund Husserl, who likewise sought to develop a theory of the other, and illustrate similar problems and deficiencies found in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological philosophy.’

...Recognition by other makes me available to myself as a totality in a way that I cannot achieve on my own. The self depends on the other present in its ownmost self-relation for its own self-knowledge. Fichte thus introduces the thesis of a mediated autonomy, a mediated self-relation, a mediated self-knowledge.’

‘(i) How do I know that I am free? (ii) How do we know that there are others? Fichte’s answer to both of these questions is the concept of recognition, which posits not merely a correlation between self and other, but the significant claim that my knowledge of my freedom is not a self-objectification of theoretical cognition that Kant had denied, but rather is mediated to me by the other. Recognition by other...

...and subsequent generations. For example, take Kant’s notorious doctrine of the thing in itself: according to Jacobi, without it one cannot be a Kantian philosopher, but with it one cannot remain a Kantian. Kant’s position thus subverts itself.’

‘One of the sharpest critics of Kant and German idealism in general was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi...Jacobi, a student and translator of David Hume, takes a Humean position that we are confronted with a disastrous choice between a false reason and no reason at all, that is, that reason and philosophical cognition are self-subverting. His criticisms of Kant are among the most influential, on both his contemporaries and

‘As far as the self-consciousness of freedom is concerned, for Kant the outcome is that there is no cognitive access of the self to its freedom. I not only do not know, but cannot know that I am free.’