Abstract
One way to characterize Kant’s legacy to German Idealism would be to say that it is the respectability of the project of idealism itself. The early eighteenth-century idealism or “immaterialism” of George Berkeley and Arthur Collier1 had hardly made idealism a respectable position in their time. But when Kant promulgated his “transcendental idealism” in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , in 1781, having anticipated it in his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World of 1770, he put idealism at the center of philosophical discussion in Germany for the next fifty years, to the death of Hegel in 1831, or beyond. Indeed, it could well be argued that Kant made some form of idealism a central issue and viable position in philosophy well into the twentieth century, not only in German Neo-Kantianism, but in British and American Neo-Hegelianism and their parallels in French and Italian philosophy and beyond. To be sure, Kant immediately had to struggle to distinguish his transcendental idealism from the scorned idealism of Berkeley and his few fellows, and no one except Kant’s epigones adopted his form of idealism without significant modification. But without Kant, it could hardly be imagined that such philosophers as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer would have had significant philosophical careers at all, let alone that they would have tried to express what they had to say as some form of idealism.
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Notes
For recent approaches to the development of German Idealism that stress the Idealists’ responses to Kant’s claim that philosophy must be “systematic” or “scientific,” see Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005);
Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012);
and Walter Jaeschke and Andreas Arndt, Die Klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant: Systeme der reinen Vernunft und ihre Kritik 1785–1846 (Munich: Beck, 2012). For an approach focusing on the Idealists’ “struggle against subjectivism,” or their attempt to overcome Berkeleyan tendencies in Kant, see
Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), although, as the dates cited in this title make clear, this work deals with Fichte and Schelling but not Hegel.
The “methodological” or “epistemological” interpretation of transcendental idealism has been maintained by Henry E. Allison in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and further defended in the second edition (2004); but was anticipated by
Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of One Central Argument in the “Critique of Pure Reason ” (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962);
and Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974). Allison’s characterization of his interpretation as “epistemological” is misleading, because the alternative interpretation of transcendenta l idealism suggested here is also epistemological, turning as it does on Kant’s explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge . I have defended this account at length in
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 354–69;
and Paul Guyer, “Debating Allison on Transcendental Idealism,” Kantian Review 12, no. 2 (2007): 10–23.
Kant attempted to work out a physics with an ether and thus without genuine action at a distance in his Opus postumum , the manuscript on which he worked from 1797 until a year or so before his death, which was unknown to the German Idealists. See Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Ether Deduction and the Possibility of Experience,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Kant Congress , ed. Gerhard Funke and T. M. Seebohm (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), 110–23, reprinted in
Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 74–85;
Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 290–315; and
Eckart Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the “Opus postumum” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 75–116.
See Paul Guyer, “Kant on Common Sense and Skepticism,” Kantian Review 7 (March 2003): 1–37, reprinted in
Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 23–70;
and Michael N. Forster, Kant and Skepticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
See Paul Guyer, “Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism , ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–56.
Hegel made this charge in his 1802 chapter on natural law (NL 76–77 [HW 2:460–62]), and repeated it in the Philosophy of Right (PR §135). For my approach to this charge, see Paul Guyer, “The Inescapability of Contingency: The Form and Content of Freedom in Kant and Hegel,” in Philosophie nach Kant , ed. Mario Egger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 439–62. For an alternative approach, see
Sally Sedgwick, “Hegel on the Empty Formalism of Kant’s Categorical Imperative,” in A Companion to Hegel , ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Chichester: Wiley–Blackwell, 2011), 265–80.
I have been working out this approach to Kant’s practical philosophy in publications beginning with my “Kant’s Morality of Law and Morality of Freedom,” in Kant and Critique: New Essays in Honor of W. H. Werkmeister , ed. Russell M. Dancy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 43–89; and “Freiheit als ‘der innere Werth der Welt,’” in Das Recht der Vernunft: Kant und Hegel über Denken, Erkennen und Handeln , ed. Christel Fricke, Peter König, and Thomas Petersen (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1995), 231– 62; both reprinted, the latter in English, in Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129–71, 96 –125.
See also Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom , esp. chs. 6–8; and Paul Guyer, Kant , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014).
I do not think Kant ever worked out a fully explicit argument for his position, but I believe that the underlying idea is that the only way we can truly be free from control by our mere impulses is by acting in accordance with the principle that everyone is always to be as free to act as they choose as is consistent with everyone else always being that free. I think that the author who comes closest to me in ascribing such a view to Kant is Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), although I think that she slides too quickly from the idea of being liberated from impulse by something that is more than a momentary reason for me to the idea that I can be liberated from impulse only by something that is a reason for all – this is precisely the step that I think needs to be explained.
See Paul Guyer, “Constructivism and Self-Constitution,” in Kant on Practical Justification: Interpretive Essays , ed. Mark Timmons and Sorin Baiasu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 176–200.
I have developed this interpretation in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chs. 3 and 6; and
Paul Guyer, “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77–109. My interpretation has been criticized on a variety of grounds, notably by
Hannah Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland, 1990);
and Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the “Critique of Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Here Kant is just adopting the standard eighteenth-century ontology of beauty, first formulated by Francis Hutcheson in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Treatise I, section 1, paragraph 9; in the revised edition by Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 23.
See Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste , ch. 9, section “Conditions and Proportions,” in the second edition, 284–88; and/or Paul Guyer, “The Psychology of Kant’s Aesthetics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008): 483–94.
See Paul Guyer, “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals”, in Kant’s “Metaphysics of Morals”: A Critical Guide , ed. Lara Denis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 130–51.
I have expounded this analysis of the central argument of Kant’s teleology in a number of places; see for example Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), ch. 12.
E.g., in Arthur Schopenhauer, “Fragments for a History of Philosophy,” in Parerga and Paralipomena , trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1:132.
I have contrasted Schopenhauer’s and Kant’s approaches to moral philosophy, with an emphasis on the role of metaphysical insight in Schopenhauer’s approach, in Paul Guyer, “Schopenhauer, Kant and Compassion,” Kantian Review 17, no. 3 (Nov. 2012): 403–29.
Some authors have attempted to find an a priori proof of the necessity of evil in Kant’s Religion , for example Serriol Morgan, “The Missing Formal Proof of Humanity’s Radical Evil in Kant’s Religion”, Philosophical Review 114, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 63–114;
and David Sussman, “Perversity of the Heart,” Philosophical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2005): 153–77. For an approach closer to the one I have just suggested,
see Lawrence R. Pasternak, The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” (London: Routledge, 2014).
See my treatment of the aesthetics of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel in Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics , vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); as well as earlier treatments in
Paul Guyer, “Hegel on Kant’s Aesthetics: Necessity and Contingency in Beauty and Art,” in Hegel und die “Kritik der Urteilskraft” ed. Hans-Friedrich Fulda and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 81–99, reprinted in
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161–83;
and Paul Guyer, “Back to Truth: Knowledge and Pleasure in the Aesthetics of Schopenhauer,” in Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value , ed. Alex Neill and Christopher Janaway (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 11–25.
See especially Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , 2 vols., ed. and trans. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1:197–98.
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Guyer, P. (2014). Kant’s Legacy for German Idealism: Versions of Autonomy. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_3
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