Idealistic Studies

Fichte’s The Way towards the Blessed Life is a genuinely mystical work that contains several themes characteristic of mystical writing: the opposition of a non-spatio-temporal, non-manifold being to the world as it appears; the ineffability of the Divine; the centrality of union with God and of detachment; and the individual as a conduit for Divine life and love. It must, however, be granted that Fichte conjoins his affirmations of union with denials that the ontological identity of human beings and God is a matter of experience. This is nevertheless an insufficient reason for denying that Fichte’s text is correctly characterized as mystical, for experience of God’s presence is a more adequate criterion of the mystical than the experience of ontological identity or even of union with God, and the experiences that The Way towards the Blessed Life does acknowledge are properly interpreted in terms of Divine presence.

Much has been made within certain philosophic circles of Emmanuel Levinas’s interaction with and critique of Western philosophy in general and German Idealism in particular. What is little recognized, however, is that J. G. Fichte is often the hidden target of this salvo. Indeed, Fichte appears within Levinas’s work as one of the major foils against whom he attempts to define his own insights. Whenexamined in light of Levinas’s attack, however, Fichte’s work actually appears to be in remarkable contiguity with Levinas. The aim of this paper is to illuminate these commonalities by making an apology for Fichte in light of Levinas’s criticism. The result of this examination is the revelation that the German Idealism of such thinkers as Fichte, rather than rivaling Levinas’s work, actually proves to be in many ways its ally and intellectual forerunner.

Though Novalis was considered by both his contemporaries and his first critics to have made both an important philosophical as well as literary contribution, his place and significance in the history of philosophy has only rarely been clearly demarcated. It is only with the publication of the Novalis Schriften that an interest in Novalis’s philosophical contribution has arisen. Though the main discussion in the literature focuses on one of the central concepts in Novalis’s thought, that of presentation (Darstellung, Repräsentation), it fails to provide an adequate interpretation of it because it does not directly address a more fundamental concept in his thought, the absolute. After all, for Novalis, presentation is always presentation of the absolute, and the possibliity or impossibility of presentation is determined by the nature of the absolute. This paper attempts to correct the contemporary debate by emphasizing and clearly defining the absolute, examining it in relation to presentation.

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what in Plato is the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason.

Given the evidence available today, we know that the later Middle Ages knew strong forms of idealism. However, Plato alone will not do to explain some of its features. Aristotle was the most important philosophical authority in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but until now no one dared explore in his thought the roots of this idealism because of the dogma of realism surrounding him. I challenge this dogma, showing that the Stagirite contained in his thought the roots of idealist aspects that will be developed, namely by Dietrich of Freiberg and Eckhart of Hochheim, into a fully idealist epistemology.

True freedom involves choices whose scope is not limited in advance by a particular dogma. When we attempt to understand it, a number of questions arise. It is unclear, for example, how the openness of real choice can fit into the organized structures of political life. What prevents the expressions of freedom from disrupting this life? What sets limits to their arbitrariness? The general questionhere concerns the adaptability of freedom to a political context. In this paper, I argue that freedom is inherently political because its origin is social. It gains its content from the multiple interactions that make up social life.