Idealistic Studies

An antipathy to absolutes has been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century philosophy: universality, necessity, objectivity and the like have figured prominently on its index of prohibitions. Ironically, this anti-absolutism itself represents an absolutism of sorts. And it is actually injurious to the interests of philosophizing where adequacy sometimes demands absoluteness. Certain philosophicallysignificant facts root in the non-negotiable necessities of things—the wickedness of inflicting needless pain, for one.

Nietzsche’s concept of the self grows out of Kant—and then attempts to subvert Kant. Nietzsche agrees that a unified subject is a necessary presupposition for ordered experience to be possible. But instead of a Kantian unified self, Nietzsche develops a conception of the self of the sort that we have come to call postmodern. He posits a composite bundle of drives that become unified only through organization. This subject is unified, it is just that its unity is forged, constructed, brought about by domination. But if the self is a bundle of struggling and shifting drives, how could it remain unified over time? Nietzsche’s concept of the self requires his doctrine of eternal recurrence, which promises that I will remain the same, exactly and precisely the same, without the slightest change, not merely throughout this life, but for an eternity of lives.

This essay represents a novel contribution to Nietzschean studies by combining an assessment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenging uses of “truth” and the “eternal return” with his insights drawn from Indian philosophies. Specifically, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of a static philosophy of being underpinning conceptual truth is best understood in line with the Theravada Buddhist critique of “self ” and “ego” as transitory. In conclusion, I find that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” can be understood as a direct inversion of “nirvana”: Nietzsche celebrates profound attachment to each and every moment, independent from its pleasurable or distasteful registry.

In this essay, I focus exclusively on an ill-understood Schopenhauerian objection to realism, which I call the Inconceivability Argument (since its conclusion is that realism is inconceivable or unintelligible). The received scholarly view of Schopenhauer’s supposedly conclusive disproof of realism is that it is nothing but a simple and familiar fallacy. I disagree; and in this paper I develop three ways of understanding the Inconceivability Argument, according to which Schopenhauer’s reductio is not an insubstantial and worthless sophism but a solid construction in which some valuable philosophical insights are embedded.

This article focuses on Emerson’s emphasis on the limits of language. This emphasis is important because for Emerson self-expression in language is an essential part of the process of becoming self-reliant. Emerson thus shows us the way in which language often prevents us from becoming self-reliant. Emerson performatively shows the limits of language in an effort to inspire his audience to develop self-reliance in speaking for themselves. The article locates Emerson’s emphasis on the limits of language within the context of nineteenth-century thought. His approach is contrasted with German Idealists such as Fichte and Hegel and Romantic poets such as Wordsworth. Moreover, the article emphasizes similarities between Emerson and Europeans such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

This paper analyzes two inauthentic approaches to the problem of boredom from Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s perpectives. I maintain that their narratives—Nausea and “The “Seducer’s Diary”—fit this problem perfectly, as it is through narratives that we appreciate and learn to avoid boredom. I also submit that their solutions are doomed to failure because they attempt to be the sole authors of their own stories, without making room for alterity.

This article explores the recent reception of the German Idealist tradition within the English-speaking philosophical world. Texts by four authors—Fredrick Beiser, Richard Velkley, Dennis Schmidt, and Gregg Horowitz—are examined as to their respective participation in what I call a materialist appropriation of German Idealism. In this article, I explore (1) what the term ‘materialism’ means in this context and (2) the reasons for such a new interpretation. I hold that this interpretation is utilized as a response to the Enlightenment priority of universalizing abstraction. Further, I hold that such an interpretation amounts to a reclaiming of German Idealism from previous interpretations which viewed it as supporting this priority.

In the Anthropology, Kant wonders whether the genius or the individual possessing perfected judgment has contributed more to the advance of culture. In the KU, Kant answers this question definitively on the side of those with perfected judgment. Nevertheless, occurring as it does in §50 of the KU, immediately after Kant’s celebration of the genius in §49, this only raises more questions. Kantrejects the genius in favour of the individual of taste as an advancer of culture, yet under what conditions could the genius contribute? And, what threat does the genius really pose to this advance, other than that of penning simple nonsense? My essay attempts to answer these questions, using key texts and overlooked Reflexionen, all of which nest Kant’s concern for the genius in the associated risks of fanaticism. I conclude that, given certain conditions, the genius can contribute in a unique manner to the advance of culture.

This essay discusses Kant’s account of truth, arguing that he offers us a weak coherence theory: weak for his insistence on an independent, sensuous content for intuition, coherentist for the transcendental apparatus supporting experience. While Kant is free to use the language of correspondence within experience, “empirical truth” will always be limited by the formative requirements setby “transcendental truth.” The difficulty, for Kant, is the role played by sensuous content since the sameness of this content in intersubjective experience seems to point outside the conditions of synthesis to a transcendentally real object. While the consequence of this would seem to leave Kant in a contradiction—denying transcendental realism at the same time that he must affirm it—we must read Kant’s insistence on a merely negative use of noumena as evidence that he adopts the role of the skeptic as a means for maintaining his epistemic goals.

In the Transcendental Deductions, Kant attempts to establish the necessary applicability of the categories to what is encountered in experience. As I see it, the argument is intended to deduce two distinct, but, in Kant’s eyes, interrelated, claims. The first is that it is a necessity that experience be of an objective world. Call this rough idea the objectivity thesis. The second thesis is that the categoriesapply only to mere appearances, that is, the world insofar as we structure it. Call this the idealist thesis. P. F. Strawson attempted to split the two claims in order to save the objectivity thesis from what he saw as its unnecessary idealist trappings. My thesis is that the objectivity thesis depends upon the idealist thesis and cannot survive on its own.

Hermann Cohen’s early interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom anticipates contemporary interpretations in denying that freedom signifies a literal metaphysical power. Cohen would have been critical, however, of the view popular among contemporary Kantians that the concept of autonomy can be justified by a direct appeal to the standpoint of the one who exercises and evaluates conscious moral choices. Cohen rejects Kant’s own strategy of appealing to the moral law as a “revelation” of freedom, undertaking a strictly transcendental derivation of both freedom and morality. Cohen’s own attempt to ground freedom and morality in a set of purely transcendental refl ections is a failure, but understanding the reasons for this failure enables us to draw important conclusions about the alleged priority of the value of autonomy in the normative domain, and hence about the contemporary viability of Kantian positions in the field of ethics.

The possibility of positing critiques of the contemporary from within Hegel’s political philosophy is by no means evident. In fact, Hegel’s political philosophy has been plagued with accusations of quietism and conservatism and Hegel himself claims that the philosophical task is retrospective and descriptive. Yet, in spite of this claim, Hegel posits a critique of his contemporaries, the Jacobins. I attempt to answer the question, is Hegel’s critique of the Jacobins consistent with his political philosophy as a whole? Or, is this critique a mere inconsistency in Hegel’s system? In essence, is Hegel justified, on his own grounds, to criticize the Jacobins? In order to answer this question, I identify what Hegel means by the “genuinely philosophical viewpoint,” which he equates with the “world-historical perspective,” and show that this perspective is not limited to historical description, but does in fact allow and even call for political discernment and critique.

Plato’s allegory of the cave tells of the soul’s advance from ignorance to knowledge, leaving open the question of what this knowledge is and what its objects are. Heidegger’s 1947 analysis of the allegory is of course just one of many. However, as I argue in this paper, if we read that analysis in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, we find a remarkable congruence between the latter’s process of “eidetic reduction” and the ascent out of the cave. In §1, I lay out the phenomenological concepts relevant to my interpretation of Heidegger’s text. In §2, I apply these to the allegory itself. In §3, I examine Heidegger’s critique of eidetic “truth” in the allegory, arguing that it equally applies to Husserl’s phenomenology. My paper shows both the utility and limits of a “phenomenological” approach toreading Plato’s theory of forms.

This paper pursues the double task of (a) presenting Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a systematic critique of culture and (b) assessing this systematic approach with regards to the question of reason vs. relativism. First, it reconstructs the development of his theory to its mature presentation in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer here presents a critique of culture as fulfilling Kant’s critical work by insisting on the plurality of reason as spirit, manifesting itself in symbolic forms. In the second part, the consequences of this approach will be drawn by considering the systematics Cassirer intended with this theory. As can be reconstructed from his metaphilosophical reflections, the strength of Cassirer’s philosophy is that it accounts for the plurality of rational-spiritual activity while at the same time not succumbing to a relativism. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms steers a middle course between a rational fundamentalism and a postmodern relativism.

Cassirer counts history as a symbolic form in his list that includes myth, religion, language, art, and science, but his discussion of history is confined to a chapter in An Essay on Man. A more complete understanding requires attention to a year-long seminar he taught at Yale on “The Philosophy of History” in 1941–1942. The partially unpublished texts of this seminar are the most extended exposition of Cassirer’s conception of history as a symbolic form. The key source for Cassirer’s philosophy of history is Vico. Cassirer holds that “historical consciousness” is a very late product of human civilization not found before the Greeks and even with the Greeks history is not analyzed as a particular form of thought. Cassirer claims that such analysis did not appear until the eighteenth century in the work of Vico and Herder.

This article explores Schelling’s view concerning the eventual reconciliation of modern individuality and society. It is argued that in Schelling’s speculations on this subject, aesthetic models play a prominent role: on the level of society by expressing the need for a new mythology; on the level of the individual by formulating a normative ideal in which the individual is modelled after the work of artand its creator: the artistic genius. This normative view on modern individuality is quite ambivalent. It summons the individual to abandon its individuality and to have it determined by universality. But, since Schelling wants the individual to be a real individuality, his position comes down to the quest for an “individual universal.” Relying on a close-reading of Schelling’s System des transzendentalenIdealismus, the Philosophie der Kunst, and the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, the paradigm of this extraordinary position is shown to be the work of art.

This essay explores how Schelling’s Philosophy of Art promotes a theory of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) correlative to that reason informing his Philosophy of Identity. Against the background of Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental-philosophical notion of the imagination, it shows how Schelling conceives the absolute identity of the ideal and the real in terms of its expression in and asthe imagination. As a name for the self-constitution of absolute identity, the term “Einbildungskraft” denotes for Schelling not merely the formative activity of picturing, but instead the generative dynamic of imprinting, and this as the singular operation of unification in the sense of genuinely making the disparate—the finite and the infinite—into one. How this theory involves a view of artistic symbols as instantiating pure unity is discussed with reference to Schelling’s theory of tragedy as well as Hegel’s criticism of this conception.

This paper deals with the problematic relationship between thought and nature in Hegel. This entails looking at the philosophy of nature and discovering to what extent it claims to incorporate natural otherness or contingency and how it does so. I briefly summarize other approaches to this question (Maker, Winfield, Braun, Wandschneider, Hoffheimer . . .) while putting forward my own solution. This is expressed in an argument articulated around the three Hegelian images (and their texts) in the paper’s title. We discover how the relation between philosophy and nature is a dynamic one, mediated by the actual content of the positive natural sciences. In other words, thought and nature are mediated by the human activity of scientific knowing, within the systematic project of knowing all of nature. This raises the possibility of conceiving Hegel’s system as open to the future.

It is perhaps too early in the long history of humanity to draw definitive conclusions concerning the historical trajectories of traditional socialist countries. It is well known that major changes have been occurring in these countries, with most even turning away from socialism altogether. Many explanations have been propounded for this phenomenon. Some observers explain the turn away fromsocialism as a result of the backward stage of the development of productive forces. Everyone knows that most socialist countries were set up during times of poor economic conditions. Certainly, it is difficult to say how advanced the productive forces need to be in order to set up a durable and practical socialist system. In discussing the problem, I will be re-examining the practice of so-called traditionalsocialism in concentrating mostly on China, a country which has been and still is guided by its understanding of Marx’s theory of historical materialism.