Essays

Beiser says the attempt to give empirical reality a stronger sense without falling back into the very realism Kant attacks has created a long and complicated debate. The proposal that affection happens on two levels is intended to preserve the idea that appearances are genuinely given to us while also allowing the thing in itself to play some explanatory role. According to this reading the empirical self receives its objects ready formed and stands to them as something receptive, whereas the transcendental self stands in some kind of deeper relation to the thing in itself which affects it. This is attractive because it seems to give empirical objects a kind of stability and independence that goes beyond their merely formal relation to space. Yet as soon as one presses the details difficulties arise because the idea of a transcendental self being affected by a thing in itself looks very much like the sort of claim Kant says we cannot make. He constantly reminds us that the transcendental standpoint is not one from which we can describe hidden processes but only one from which we can outline the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. If one begins to speak of two selves or two levels of affection one quickly slides into the kind of metaphysical picture he wanted to avoid.

Since the historical approach promises the best chance of solving some of the most difficult interpretative disputes, Beiser turns first to Kant’s lifelong struggle with idealism. He traces this struggle from Kant’s earliest writings in the 1750s through to the Opus postumum, the final work of Kant’s life. Each stage shows Kant wrestling with variants of idealism, testing different distinctions and revising his own views in response to both critics and to his own developing sense of the limits of reason. What emerges from this long story is not a simple switch from subjectivism to objectivism or the reverse, but something more layered. Kant’s transcendental idealism is neither a purely subjective doctrine in which everything begins from the inner life of consciousness, nor a purely objective doctrine in which a rational structure transcends the subject. It is a synthesis that takes elements from both sides, while resisting the reductive tendencies of each.

Beiser thinks that the legacy of German idealism will only be properly understood when contemporary philosophers recognise not only how much these thinkers anticipated later debates, but also how they went beyond many of the assumptions that still frame current discussions. He has in mind, in particular, the loose group of ideas often called postmodernism, with its suspicion of grand narratives, its distrust of foundations, and its scepticism about claims to universal truth. Think Rorty and Derrida as parade cases. Foundationalism is the view that knowledge or justification must rest on some secure base, some privileged set of beliefs or experiences that cannot themselves be called into doubt. Many twentieth century debates, both modern and postmodern, turned on whether such foundations are possible. Beiser points out that the German idealists had already witnessed and responded to the collapse of older foundational projects in the late Enlightenment.

Beiser adds another distinctive point by shifting to something that, for a long time, sat at the edges of Kant scholarship and so at the edges of standard stories about German idealism. This is Kant’s last, unfinished work, usually called the Opus Postumum. Beiser insists that if we are serious about understanding how German idealism develops between Kant and his successors, we cannot treat this unfinished text as an odd appendix or as a curiosity produced by an ageing philosopher. We have to bring it into the centre of the story.

Beiser now turns his fire most directly on what he calls the Hegelian legacy, and it is worth slowing right down over it because a lot of later misunderstanding hangs on the habits he is criticising. Up to this point he has done two things. First, he has argued that German idealism is not the glorification of the subject that many people imagine, but a long, messy struggle against subjectivism, that is, against the idea that we only ever know our own ideas and never really get outside our own heads. Second, he has warned us against reading the whole period through the myth of the absolute ego, as if everything were secretly about a cosmic Self revealing itself step by step. Now he adds a third warning. It says that we also have to liberate ourselves from Hegel’s own story about German philosophy, because that story still shapes how people think about Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, often without realising it.

Beiser carries on trying to clear away a picture of German idealism that has become almost mythical. He has already argued that it is a mistake to see the history of these thinkers as a slow swelling of the human subject, a story where the modest Kantian self gradually inflates into a vast cosmic mind that creates everything. Now he turns to the special role played in that myth by the idea of an infinite self or absolute ego.

The first time you open Beiser’s introduction to German idealism, it feels like stumbling into week seven of a philosophy course you definitely did not sign up for. Everyone in the room clearly knows who Reinhold is, they are nodding about the Opus Postumum, and you are still trying to pronounce Fichte. Names everywhere, titles everywhere, long sentences that assume you were quietly reading Kant in your teens. You feel, very quickly, slightly despised by the book. So, naturally, you despise it back. But if you sit with it, something else starts to appear under the avalanche. That is what I am trying to do here, to slow the whole thing down, to let Beiser keep his seriousness, while translating his set up so that someone who has not been secretly living in Jena can still follow the plot.

Beiser’s picture of neo Kantianism begins from something quite simple. In nineteenth century Germany there is a huge success story, the natural sciences, and a huge crash, the collapse of the big speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the middle is philosophy, suddenly unsure what it is for. Scientists say that matter and evolution explain everything. The churches defend revelation and tradition. Philosophers face an identity crisis. Are they still needed, and if so, for what?

In Beiser’s account the neo Kantian revival is not the work of a few great names erupting in the 1870s. It is a gradual, uneven reawakening stretching over decades, involving many thinkers who are usually left out of mainstream histories. Some were university teachers, some were critics of materialism, some were historians of philosophy, some were psychologists, and some were independent scholars writing for a wider audience. Beiser treats them as the connective tissue of the movement. Without them the revival would never have taken the shape that later became the Marburg and Baden schools.

Let’s turn to Wilhelm Windelband, another major figure in the neo-Kantian story as framed by top philosopher Frederick C. Beiser. His work reveals how the neo-Kantian movement shifted from pure epistemology and science toward values, culture and the human sciences. His book was the book Sam Beckett made loads of notes about philosophy from and so we might have a good thought and say Beckett was responding to neo-Kanteanism. Not many people have had that thought until now so whew! It's a bit heady. We might even have the thought that Beckett is doing a kind of Windelbandian neo-Kantian thing! That might be going too far but Woah! It's a good thought so I'm going to keep thinking it for a little while.

Eduard Zeller appears in Beiser’s story as the quiet, methodical figure who shows that neo Kantianism can be serious and sober rather than dramatic. Where someone like Kuno Fischer turns Kant into a stage play about freedom and will, Zeller turns Kant into a discipline, almost a temperament. For Beiser, he is one of the central figures of the 1860s revival, the decade when “back to Kant” becomes an academic programme rather than a slogan, and when philosophy starts to redefine itself as theory of knowledge.

In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Paul Natorp stands at an important turning point. He is not as dramatic a figure as Hermann Cohen, nor as colourful as Kuno Fischer, but Beiser treats him as someone who quietly carries the movement from its early, exploratory phase into a stable, institutional form. Natorp helps turn neo Kantianism into something a university can teach, support and reproduce, and he does so by extending its concerns into pedagogy, education and the communal life of science.