BEISER'S IDEALISM (5): Objectivity without a view from nowhere

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.

 They were not living in a world of serene certainty. They were living through a crisis where older metaphysical systems had been criticised from every side, where scepticism seemed an ever present threat, and where the authority of religion and traditional philosophy had weakened. The striking thing, for him, is that their response to this situation was both more subtle and more constructive than most postmodern rejections of foundations. They accepted that the old picture of knowledge resting on indubitable givens had broken down, but they did not conclude that there is no truth, or that only power and language games remain. They tried instead to work out what kind of objectivity is still possible once we give up the dream of a view from nowhere.

This is one reason he insists that the German idealists are not just historical curiosities but living interlocutors. They faced something very like our own predicament and did not collapse into easy relativism or cynicism. That, in his eyes, is what makes them so relevant today, especially to anyone who is dissatisfied with both naive scientism and glib postmodernism. From there he turns back to the Hegelian legacy that he criticised earlier. He reminds the reader that the now familiar subjectivist picture of German idealism, where everything culminates in a cosmic self, has its roots in Hegel’s own way of writing the history of philosophy. Hegel presented his system as the culmination of German idealism and, more grandly, as the point at which spirit becomes fully conscious of itself. Spirit here is a technical term. It refers not to a ghostly substance but to the whole network of social life, culture, law and institutions in which human freedom takes shape. The problem, as Beiser sees it, is that once you treat Hegel’s system as the endpoint and treat this self consciousness of spirit as the end of history, it is easy for later readers to slide into a subjectivist interpretation. If Hegel’s absolute is read as an infinite mind, and if his system is taken as the climax of the entire movement, then it looks as though the inner purpose of German idealism all along was to arrive at the idea of an infinite subject.

He concedes that, at first glance, this subjectivist reading has some plausibility when applied to Hegel’s mature system. There really is a sense in which the later Hegel, after his break with Schelling around 1804, moves away from a more nature centred conception of the absolute and gives greater weight to spirit. He criticises Schelling’s conception of the absolute for being too naturalistic, for not giving enough space to the sphere of institutions, law, the state and history. In response Hegel begins to describe the absolute less in terms of nature and more in terms of spirit. This has led some scholars to think of him as siding finally with thinkers like Fichte, for whom the subject was central, rather than with Spinoza and Schelling, for whom nature played the leading role. Yet Beiser warns that such a reading is one sided. It exaggerates Hegel’s correction of Spinoza and Schelling while forgetting how much he still shares with them. Like Schelling and the Romantic generation, Hegel regards the absolute as the idea, that is, as a rational structure that serves as both formal and final cause of what exists. Formal cause here means the pattern or form that makes something what it is. Final cause means the end or purpose toward which things tend. Hegel sees this rational structure as manifesting itself in nature and in spirit alike. It is true that, compared with Schelling, he gives more weight to spirit. Schelling had tended to give priority to nature and gave relatively little place to social and historical institutions in his own identity system. Hegel redresses that balance. Even so, he continues to treat the realm of spirit as only one manifestation of the absolute. The culmination of his system lies not in spirit considered alone, but in the idea itself as the unity of nature and spirit. (Think of this as a manifestation of the nature/nurture debate if it helps).

Whatever view one takes of Hegel’s own position, Beiser notes that Hegel’s way of telling the story of philosophy has lost its old authority. Research on German idealism has moved away from treating earlier figures as mere stepping stones on the path to Hegel’s system. Scholars now work on Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel and Schelling in their own right, using their own categories, without assuming that their significance lies in how they prefigure Hegel. This is progress in Beiser’s eyes. Even so, he thinks it is important to see exactly what went wrong in Hegel’s history. The difficulty, he says, is not that Hegel had a bad method in theory. On the contrary, Hegel insists, in very modern fashion, that each philosophy must be interpreted from within, on its own terms and in its own context. That is what it means to be a historicist, someone who believes that ideas arise out of particular historical situations and must be understood in relation to them. The problem is that Hegel did not practise what he preached. Instead he appropriated the past. He exaggerated his own originality and individuality by claiming as his distinctive doctrines insights that had already appeared around him. Beiser’s claim is that almost every theme we associate with Hegel can be traced back to earlier thinkers in Jena and elsewhere. The true fathers of absolute idealism, in the sense of objective or holistic idealism, were Hölderlin, Schlegel and Schelling. Yet in Hegel’s history of philosophy, Hölderlin is not even mentioned, Schlegel is mocked and marginalised, and Schelling is treated as a mere stepping stone. Ideas that later readers regard as uniquely Hegelian were common currency in Jena before he arrived there in 1801. Concepts such as dialectic understood as the immanent critique of positions from within, the synthesis of Fichte and Spinoza, the absolute as the identity of identity and difference, the importance of history for philosophy, the notion of self objectification and alienation, the attempt to reconcile community and individual liberty, were all being discussed and experimented with before Hegel’s major works appeared. To say this, Beiser is careful to add, is not to belittle Hegel’s achievement. Hegel’s strength lay in his extraordinary capacity to systematise and integrate. Where his contemporaries often left their ideas scattered in notebooks, fragmentary essays and lectures, he built a single, highly structured system that wove together themes from many sources. It is not wrong to think of him as the one who summarised, rationalised and organised a wealth of ideas generated by more improvisational minds. But it is wrong to treat him as the solitary creator of those ideas. Beiser likes the image used by Hegel’s friends who knew him in his Jena days. They called him the old man on crutches, a tortoise among hares. While the hares raced, spent their energy and burnt out, the tortoise moved slowly and steadily, eventually crossing the finish line alone. Like many victors, he then wrote the story of the race from his own point of view, as the tale of his triumph. 

With Hegel placed in better historical perspective, Beiser turns to what he calls the taxonomy of German idealism. Taxonomy here is just a way of saying classification. He stresses that anyone who has studied German philosophy from Kant to Hegel will know that the phrase “German idealism” is not univocal. That is, it does not name a single doctrine that all the main figures accept. Across these twenty years there is a cluster of different positions that sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict. It would be false to say there is nothing in common at all, but it would be equally false to pretend there is a single, precise core thesis that everyone holds. Beiser’s main historical claim is that between 1781 and 1801 two basic forms of idealism developed. The first is the subjective or formal idealism of Kant and Fichte. The second is the objective or absolute idealism of the early Romantics and the young Hegel. Subjective idealism, in this context, does not mean naive Berkeleyanism, where only ideas in the mind exist so everything's a dream, including the dreamer. It means that the transcendental subject is the source of the form of experience but not of its matter. The transcendental subject is the self considered not as a concrete person, but as the set of functions or capacities that make experience possible at all. On this view, the general framework of experience, such as space, time and the categories of the understanding, originates in the subject. The specific content that fills this framework is given.

Objective or absolute idealism, by contrast, claims that the forms of experience are self subsistent. That is, they are not created by the subject, but belong to a realm of pure being that both subject and object presuppose. Here the ideal, or rational structure, is no longer attached to the subject as its source. It is treated as an archetypal order that thinks itself through nature and through spirit. Both mind and world are particular expressions of this wider reality. Beiser ties this distinction back to an older vocabulary, in which people spoke of the mundus intelligibilis, the intelligible world. In some early modern writers, including Leibniz, this intelligible world is understood both as a rational structure and as a mental or spiritual realm. This double meaning contributed to later confusion. If the rational structure of reality is identified with a mental or spiritual world, it becomes easier to slide from talk of objective forms to talk of an infinite mind. Only in the 1790s, Beiser argues, did the Romantic generation fully disentangle these senses. For them, the intelligible could be understood as structural and normative, without being mental in any straightforward sense. That shift made it possible to develop a new kind of objective idealism, in which the rational order is neither simply identical with the subject nor reducible to the objects of experience.

Even so, he advises against drawing too sharp a boundary between the two forms of idealism. Objective idealism grew out of subjective idealism by drawing out strands that were already implicit within it. Kant and Fichte had already argued that the possibility of self consciousness depends on universal and necessary forms of experience. The subject can only know itself, attribute thoughts and actions to itself, and perceive an objective world because these general forms hold. The objective idealists took this insight and turned it around. If the identity of the subject depends on these forms, they reasoned, then the subject cannot be their ultimate source. The subject is made possible by them. They must therefore be more fundamental than any particular self. From their point of view, both subject and object are instances of the same rational order, which they call the absolute or pure being.

At the same time, Beiser points out that objective idealists did not erase the importance of subjectivity. They often insisted that the transcendental subject is the highest organisation of the powers of nature or history. In that sense, the self is still given pride of place. It is no longer the foundation or starting point of the system, but it is the culmination. Nature and history reach their fullest development in the form of self consciousness. For this reason Beiser urges caution when people say that absolute idealism lets the absolute exist independently of any knowing subject. Schelling, Hegel and their Romantic contemporaries all held that the absolute achieves its fullest realisation only in the self awareness of rational beings. There is no strict dualism between the subject’s knowledge of the absolute and the absolute as it is in itself. For them, the subject’s knowledge is the way in which the absolute comes to know itself.

What really unites all these forms of idealism, and makes it reasonable to speak of a single tradition, is not a single doctrine but a shared approach to a pair of problems. Since Kant, philosophers in this milieu had become preoccupied with two closely related questions. First, how is knowledge possible at all. Second, how can we account for the reality of the external world. These questions intertwine in a way that creates a deep and puzzling predicament. To explain how knowledge is possible, it seems necessary to show that subject and object are not utterly alien to one another. If there were no common element, no shared structure, then there would be no way for our thoughts to latch on to the world. That leads to the principle of subject object identity, the idea that there must be some point of identity or overlap between the knower and what is known. (Like saying even if we wear pink lenses the world has to be able to pink itself somehow). However, to safeguard the reality of the external world, it also seems necessary to insist on a dualism between subject and object. Objects present themselves as given, as not simply under our control. If we erase that difference, we risk sliding back into a subjectivism where the world becomes a projection.( The world is pink because our pink lenses cause it to be so). German idealism as a whole is driven by the attempt to find a principle that can express both sides at once, a principle that both overcomes dualism and explains why dualism appears in experience. This is what Hegel later captured with his enigmatic remark that the task of philosophy is to find the identity of identity and non identity. People mock Hegel's language but to be fair he's trying to express things that are pretty difficult to express in a language used to working with common sense.

With this framework in place, Beiser turns to the clash of interpretations around Kant. Over two centuries, readers have offered radically different readings of Kant’s transcendental idealism. At one extreme is the subjectivist interpretation. It treats Kant as the culmination of the way of ideas, the tradition from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley and Hume. On this reading, Kant accepts the principle that the immediate objects of perception are inner representations. He takes that principle to its most sceptical conclusion and denies that we have direct knowledge of things as they are in themselves. All we know are our own representations, from which we must infer an independent reality. Words like “appearance” are then read as names for representations only, not for aspects of things. At the other extreme is the objectivist interpretation. It treats Kant’s transcendental idealism as a primitive form of absolute idealism, closer in spirit to Schelling and Hegel. For objectivists, the key point is that in the transcendental deduction Kant argues that the unity of experience is governed by a system of a priori concepts that are intersubjective. That is, the framework in terms of which we experience objects is not something each individual mind constructs, but something that must be shared if there is to be a common world at all. On this reading, Kant turns subjectivism upside down. The public, objective order of concepts is the condition for the existence of private ideas, not the other way round. The unity of apperception, the “I think” that must accompany all my representations, is then interpreted not as a subject but as an impersonal logical function, or as the unifying principle of experience as a whole.

Beiser thinks that each reading has some textual support, and each runs into serious difficulties. Subjectivists cannot easily make sense of Kant’s repeated insistence on the empirical reality of objects in space and his belief in things in themselves. Objectivists struggle to give due weight to the first person structure of self consciousness and the centrality of the “I” in Kant’s account. Rather than trying to settle the dispute by choosing one set of passages and ignoring the rest, Beiser suggests that we follow Kant’s own development, paying attention to his long standing opposition to both subjective and objective forms of idealism. From his early writings in the 1750s through the critical period and into the Opus Postumum, Kant criticises any doctrine that either denies the reality of the external world or tries to dissolve it into a purely intelligible or noumenal realm. His transcendental idealism, Beiser argues, is best understood as an attempt to find a middle path between these extremes, one that he already saw as threatened by the very interpretations that later commentators would put forward. 

In this way the taxonomy of subjective and objective idealism, the critique of the Hegelian legacy, the appeal to Kant’s late work, and the clash of interpretations over transcendental idealism, all feed into the central theme. German idealism is presented as a sustained attempt to find a principle that can do justice both to the mind’s role in experience and to the independent reality of the world, a principle that would capture the identity of identity and difference without sacrificing either side.