Abstract
In the time immediately following the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the old metaphysical systems were being undermined by the “all-crushing” (“der alleszermaltnende”) Kant and the new metaphysics of Fichte and the Philosophy of Identity had not yet come into their own. In this transitional period the attention of the philosophical world in Germany was centered in the interpretation of Kantian philosophy, and especially in the understanding of the concept of the thing-in-itself. With reference to the latter Jacobi and Maimon went further than their contemporaries. Reinhold and Beck, whose contributions consisted in interpreting and explaining Kant,1 made the Kantian philosophy accessible to wider circles. Reinhold’s interpretation of Kant betrays the difficulties and apparent contradictions of critical philosophy. Jacobi and Maimon, however, grasp the full implications of the new philosophy and with respect to the problem of the thing-in-itself draw the conclusions that necessarily follow from the principles of critical philospohy. Jacobi questions the possibility of the very concept of the thing-in-itself in a system of thought that declares the object of cognition to be confined to the realm of phenomena. His analysis, however, led him away from critical philosophy to romanticism and to the adoption of a philosophical viewpoint in opposition to Kant. Maimon, on the other hand, declares that the concept of the thing-in-itself belongs to the realm of ideas in the Kantian sense, which can be approached endlessly but never fully attained. Maimon thus gives meaning and significance to the concept of the thing-in-itself in the authentic spirit of the Kantian philosophy.
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References
See Karl L. Reinhold, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (1790), and Siegmund Beck, Einzig möglicher Standpunkt aus welchem die kritische Philosophie beurteilt werden muss (1796).
Tr., p. 419; Kat. d. Arist., p. 143; Krit. Unt., pp. 155-158.
Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 50, where he writes of Fichte that he prepared the way for the development of the concept of the objective spirit and of the form of pantheism that was evolved through metaphysical dialectics, and then adds: “If the methods of critical analysis, as developed by Lambert, Kant and Maimon, had been further pursued… the course of the development of philosophy would have been entirely different.”
See “Über die Progressen der Philosophie,” in Str., p. 58.
Cf. Tr., pp. 171, 443.
Cf. TV., pp. 48 f.
Ibid., p. 50.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 54.
By logical possibility is meant the deduction of reality from a priori principles, and not merely freedom from contradiction. Cf. below, Chap. VIII.
Tr. pp. 56 f.
Ibid., p. 57; cf. below, Chap. IX.
Tr., pp. 58 f.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., pp. 62 ff.
Ibid., pp. 64 ff.
Lebensgeschichte, II, p. 253.
Com. on the Guide, qiv’at Hammoreh (Hebrew), p. 9b, also 12a.
Friedrich Kuntze, Die Philosophie Salomon Maimons, pp. 276, 307, and 341.
Cf. Str., p. 26: “… nicht eine zufällige äussere, sondern eine wesentliche innere Harmonie, die nicht bloss von einer Willkür sondern von einem Willen, der in der Natur der Objekte selbst seinen Grund hat, abhängt.”
Ibid., p. 36: “Nach der Art wie ich mir Leibnizens System denke, …bezieht sich der unendliche Verstand Gottes auf alle mögliche Dinge… die in Ansehung seiner zugleich wirklich sind. Die in Ansehung unserer wirklichen Welt ist nichts anderes als der Inbegriff aller möglichen Dinge von uns auf eine eingeschränkte A rt vorgestellt. Von diesem Inbegriff alles möglichen wird nur so viel als wirklich von uns vorgestellt, wie viel die Materie (unsere eigene Einschränkung) zulässt…”
G. W. von Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften (Gerhard edition), VII, a.
Ibid., p. 200. The translation is by Bertrand Russell. Cf. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz (Cambridge, 1900), p. 61.
Russell, op. cit., p. 62. However, cf. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 354, n. 68.
Cf. L. Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1903). See especially p. 18.
Friedrich Paulsen is thus incorrect in interpreting the Kantian concept of an infinite reason in the following manner: “The reality, as it is in itself, is thought by us as having its roots in an intellectus archetypus, in an absolute and intuitive reason, which conceives as a system of existing ideas” (cf. Friedrich Paulsen, “Kants Idealismus,” in Kritizismus, eine Sammlung von Beiträgen aus der Welt des Neu-Kantianismus, ed. Friedrich Myrho [Berlin, 1926], p. 3). This interpretation of Paulsen is bound up with his dogmatic conception of the Kantian things-in-themselves as realities per se to which our thinking is inexorably and necessarily driven. Paulsen writes: “We determine by necessary thinking the realm of ‘things-in-themselves’ i.e., the intelligible world… we determine them as a system of ideas which have their root and unity in an absolute spirit” (ibid.). Such a conception of Kant’s position would involve us in contradictions and difficulties and is incompatible with the very spirit of critical philosophy, which confines the realm of cognition to the sphere of phenomena. Things-in-themselves must therefore be understood in a critical sense as limiting concepts, and correspondingly, the idea of an infinite reason cannot be arrived at through the medium of things-in-themselves as real entities. According to Kant, the infinite reason is rather an idea conceived for the purpose of stressing the limitations of the human mind arising from its inherent dualism of sensibility and understanding.
Philos. Wört., p. 169.
Guide, III, 20.
Ibid., I, 68.
See above, p. 75.
Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, Vol. X, 2tes Stück, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., p. 62.
Cf. below, Chap. VIII, “Principle of Determinability.”
See TV., p. 87, n.
See below, Chap. VI.
Com. to the Guide, Chap. 1.
Ibid.
See Tr., p. 366.
Ibid., p. 365.
Ibid.
This seems to be ontological thinking in the same way that it is implied in some trends of modern phenomenology, especially as developed into ontological phenomenology by Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. They all make the transition from the intentional character of our thought, i.e., that it is directed towards an object, to the ontological reality of the object. Maimon seems to have been aware of this problem. In his Krit. Unt., p. 161, Maimon tries to show that we have a concept of the absolute totality of the conditions implying the idea of an unconditional reality. This concept must have its ground in the function of our cognitive capacity. And since our sensibility and understanding are confined to the empirical realm and cannot be the basis for the unconditioned, this concept must have its ground in the capacity of reason (Vernunft). Having in mind the objection that may be raised, that it is not legitimate to make a transition from a mere form of reason to an object, Maimon writes: “Nevertheless, the concept cannot be completely empty; even though it is not of a constitutive nature and cannot determine an object, it has a regulative use, in that it directs our understanding to search constantly for the totality of the conditions and to proceed from condition to condition, and so on, ad infinitum.”
Critique of Pure Reason, Smith translation, p. 182.
Ibid., p. 187.
Cf. below, Chap. X, p. 192 f.
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© 1964 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague. Netherlands
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Atlas, S. (1964). Infinite Mind. In: From Critical to Speculative Idealism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9106-7_5
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