Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche

238 Pages·2009·1.28 MB·English

by  Paul Redding

CONTINENTAL IDEALISM
Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin
with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to
Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story
of German idealism begins with Leibniz.
Redding begins by examining Leibniz’s dispute with Newton over the
nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz
incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of
idealism. Redding shows how Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz’s views of
space and time consequently shaped his own “transcendental” version of
idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian
idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, on the one hand, and meta-
physicalscepticssuchasSchopenhauerandNietzsche,ontheother,continued
to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.
Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most
importantphilosophicalmovementsinthehistoryofphilosophy,butalsoa
valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European
philosophy.
Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a
fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is the author of
Hegel’sHermeneutics(1996),TheLogicofAffect(1999)andAnalyticPhilosophy
and the Return of Hegelian Thought (2007).

CONTINENTAL
IDEALISM
Leibniz to Nietzsche
Paul Redding
Thiseditionpublished2009
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 The Seventeenth-Century Background to the
Emergence of Continental Idealism 6
1.1 Early-modern theology and natural philosophy 6
1.2 Henry More and Newtonian “spiritualism” 9
1.3 Leibniz, Clarke and Berkeley on space and God 12
2 The Monadological World of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 20
2.1 Leibniz’s monadological world 20
2.2 Leibniz,thenewphysics,andthedivineorderlinessofthe
universe 22
2.3 Leibniz’s conception of the moral order 25
2.4 The monadological conception of the soul and its
capacities 28
2.5 Leibniz and mystico-religious Neoplatonism 32
3 Kant’s Development from Physical to Moral Monadologist 36
3.1 Kant’s pre-critical physical monadology and the mind–body
problem 37
3.2 The role of Swedenborg in the transformation of Kant’s
pre-critical thought 39
3.3 The role of Leibniz in the transformation of Kant’s pre-critical
thought 40
3.4 The role of Rousseau in the transformation of Kant’s pre-critical
thought 43
3.5 Kant’s “semi-transcendental turn” in the Inaugural Dissertation
of 1770 44
v
CONTENTS
4 Kant and the “Copernican” Conception of Transcendental
Philosophy 52
4.1 The Copernican reversal of perspective and its consequences
for metaphysics 54
4.2 The aporia of traditional metaphysics 59
4.3 Kant’s modernism 61
4.4 Kant on Aristotle’s “categories” and Plato’s “ideas” 63
4.5 Kant’s “Plato” 66
5 The Moral Framework of Metaphysics 70
5.1 The primacy of practical reason in Kant’s critical
philosophy 73
5.2 The object of “pure practical reason”—the moral law—
can only be grounded in the form, rather than the empirical
content, of the will 76
5.3 Kant’s political theory 80
5.4 Concerns with Kant’s practical philosophy 83
6 The Later Kant as a “Post-Kantian” Philosopher? 88
6.1 From empirical to transcendental accounts of Hutchesonian moral
sense 88
6.2 The ethical infrastructure of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of
Judgment 90
6.3 The symbolic dimension of beauty 95
6.4 The teleology of the world considered as a whole 97
7 Jena Post-Kantianism: Reinhold and Fichte 103
7.1 Reinhold’s “proposition of consciousness” and Schulze’s
critique 103
7.2 Fichte’s reconceptualizing of the mind as self-positing
process 106
7.3 Fichte’s project of the Wissenschaftslehre 108
7.4 Intersubjective recognition as a condition of
self-consciousness 113
8 The Jena Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich
Schelling 116
8.1 Friedrich Schlegel: Transcendental poetry and the unpresentable
absolute 118
8.2 Schlegel and the critique of foundationalism 122
8.3 Schelling and Plato’s world soul 125
8.4 Schelling’s philosophy of nature 127
8.5 Art and mythology 131
vi
CONTENTS
9 Hegel’s Idealist Metaphysics of Spirit 135
9.1 The puzzle of Hegel’s attitude to religion and metaphysics 136
9.2 Hegel’s critique of Kant’s idea of God 138
9.3 The project of a “phenomenology of spirit” 140
9.4 Self-negating shapes of consciousness 143
9.5 Self-consciousness and the recognitive theory of spirit 146
9.6 Phenomenology, logic and metaphysics 150
10 Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Ambiguous End of the Idealist
Tradition 155
10.1Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will 156
10.2The task of transcending the will: Morality and art 158
10.3Schopenhauer and Fichte’s transcendental idealism 160
10.4The early Nietzsche: Schopenhauer, Wagner and The Birth of
Tragedy 162
10.5 The later Nietzsche: Life after the deaths of tragedy and
God 165
Postscript: Idealism after the End of (Its) History 175
Notes 180
Bibliography 204
Index 221
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The most valuable assistance I have received in thinking about the material
in this book has come from the students at the University of Sydney who
have found their ways into various courses I have taught there on these
topicsoverthelastdecadeandahalf.Ifyousomehowhappentobereading
this, and recognize yourself in this description, please accept my warmest
thanks. As always, I have greatly benefited from conversations (immediate
andmediatedbythewrittenword)withafargreaternumberofpeoplethan
I could thank individually. Were I to try and make a list it would definitely
include Rick Benitez, David Braddon-Mitchell, Robert Brandom, Paolo
Diego Bubbio, Bruin Christensen, Byron Clugston, Jean-Philippe Deranty,
Moira Gatens, Stephen Gaukroger, Duncan Ivison, Jane Johnson, Jim
Kreines, Simon Lumsden, David Macarthur, George Markus, Justine
McGill, Douglas Moggach, Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, Huw Price,
Philip Quadrio, Robert Stern, Andres Von Toledo and Robert Williams.
Byron Clugston provided further invaluable help with the text, for which I
am additionally grateful.
Further afield, I wish to thank Tony Bruce at Routledge for his enthu-
siasm and for his overseeing of this project from a stage in which it was
little more than a vague, merely subjective “Vorstellung”. In the course of
this he elicited very helpful feedback and criticism from a variety of anon-
ymous reviewers, and my thanks extend to them as well. I thank also James
Thomas for his deft and sensitive editing of the manuscript. Large parts of
the project were undertaken with the assistance of a Discovery Grant from
the Australian Research Council, for which I am most grateful, as I am to
the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of
Sydney for providing the physical and scholarly support for work on this
book. Support of a very different kind has come from my life partner,
Vicki Varvaressos. For her presence I am eternally thankful.
viii
INTRODUCTION
Idealism is a philosophy that has been out of fashion for more than a cen-
tury—so far out of fashion and seeming so far off the table of defensible
philosophical positions that many philosophers would probably be hard
pressed to say anything much about it, even in criticism. Oddly enough,
idealism has even tended to remain out of fashion despite a revival of
interest in particular idealists, like the considerable revival of interest in
both Kant, a “transcendental idealist”, and the “German idealists”, Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel, who worked in his wake. Here, among those sympa-
thetic to those philosophers, it is not uncommon to encounter denials that
they were “idealists”, even in the case of Hegel, who referred to his philo-
sophy as “absolute idealism”. The general idea seems to be that one must
separate a philosopher that one wants to defend from the “i-word”, given
the simply irredeemable nature of idealism as a philosophical stance.1
One factor contributing to this strange state of affairs seems to be the
peculiarity that a philosopher who did not use the term of his own philo-
sophy has come to stand for many as the prototype idealist: George Ber-
keley, Bishop of Cloyne. That is, “idealism” seems to have come to be
synonymous with “immaterialism”, the term that Berkeley used to describe
hisownphilosophy.TheideaofBerkeleyastheprototypeidealistmaybea
conception most prominent in English-speaking philosophy, but clearly we
cannot hold anglophones entirely responsible. Kant’s transcendental ideal-
ism was, on its first appearance, linked by its German critics to the philo-
sophy of Berkeley, and Kant himself, in the “Refutation of Idealism” added
to second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, held Berkeley to be a
central representative of the idealism Kant was refuting.
In a letter to J. S. Beck, from 4 December 1792, we find Kant helpfully
clarifying the relation of his idealism to Berkeley’s immaterialism. Count-
ering the claim of those who had identified his “critical idealism” with the
philosophy of Berkeley, Kant explains: “For I speak of ideality in reference
to the form of representation while they construe it as ideality with respect
to the matter, i.e., ideality of the object and its existence itself” (Corr:
11.395). By appealing to the Aristotelian distinction between form and
1