A History of Philosophy | 56 German Idealism

we want to turn our attention now to German idealism and keep in mind the overall structure of modern thought that we've represented by these two intersecting lines that is to say that we have a tradition of continental rationalism represented by Descartes and Spinoza and lightness which after Kant leads into the German idealist tradition and if you wonder what the point of connection is it's on the emphasis on the self in the rationalists it is of course the emphasis on a priori knowledge that is to say the inner intellectual resources of the self the inner rationality of the self and then the self gets even greater importance in the development of German idealism of course we have as well the British in purist tradition represented by Locke Berkeley and Hume which leads into 19th century positivism and empiricism that will meet in people like John Stuart Mill and then in the 20th century with Bertrand Russell and logical positivism and so on and so forth from here on out what we're doing is simply following these two trends so we'll follow the European trend all the way up into the 20th century to jean-paul sartre and Beyond and then we'll back up and follow the empiricists trend from Bentham and mill way up again into 1950 and since so we will structure it that way keep in mind as well the overall timeline this other diagram hopefully is familiar enough by now a plurality of worldview --is-- traditions developing through the course of history worldviews traditions that you might label theism naturalism pantheism or something of that sort and each of them profound lis in influenced by shaped by the scientific models that have developed in the history of science whether first of course representing Greek science pythagorean or Aristotelian lays emphasis on the objective reality of form fixity of species and so forth therefore teleological worldview the second with mechanistic science losing the teleology simply a fixed mechanical order of matter and cause effect mechanisms but then as we mentioned last time around 1800 or a bit before you begin to get the rise of historical science and biological science both of which concerned with developmental process and so the the third kind of scientific model as it has come to characterize the 19th and most of the 20th century is of a more organic assort rather than mechanistic organic in the sense of the intertwined into relationships everything connected with everything else in some organic fashion and with the notion of historical process developmental process running right through it so we'll be talking about German idealism this week and next week a little bit and then picking up with some other 19th century developments fewer bark touch of marks that sort of thing but then right after spring break we'll be getting into process philosophy like Alfred North Whitehead and I might mention now that we're done with outlining but if you've done it in Kant you've learned how to do it you've learned how to read philosophy so as we get to Whitehead and thereafter we'll be reading paperback classics selected paperback classics and I'll be asking and I'll give you more specifics later on I'll be asking for book reviews rather than outlines so you'll get a chance to identify the thesis of the book this week you're working on a thesis statement for Hegel selections will go after the thesis of the book and the steps by which the thesis is developed and an evaluation of how effective is the development philosophically okay so we'll take the reading philosophy that much further for that remaining quad but keep in mind this framework so that you can see that things are going to take different shape now what we want to do therefore is to get some overall characterization first of all of German idealism what is it about and what there's some diagram indicates that I'm just erasing that historical grid what that indicates is the German idealists are rejecting and reacting against the Ultima sea of mechanistic science that is to say they do not believe that the mechanistic science of the Newtonian tradition tells us the nature of reality they will have a phenomenal list view as far as the mechanistic interpretation of nature is concerned it's talking about appearance is not about reality the underlying reality is more of an organic than a mechanical sort it's more of a developmental process than a fast etic order you'll see the static order that never changes no it's a developmental process in which there is change so one thing you can keep in mind then is that 19th century idealism is going to be a metaphysics of change a metaphysics of process and it's the root out of which later there grows 20th century process philosophy and process theology which some of you may be aware of so it's a reaction against mechanistic science now there have been other reactions against mechanistic science that we've already taken in our stride three kinds of reaction I think one which says that there must be exceptions to the mechanistic law Descartes took that point of view the mind is an exception to the causal mechanisms that rule everything else because mind has free will Scottish realists take that point of view John Locke seems to take that point of view secondly there's a complete rejection of mechanistic philosophy as not telling us the nature of reality lightness is there lightness is there his Moana dalla ji is more of a teleological scheme and in that sense liveness is some sort of an anticipation of what's coming later in the nineteenth century because we get in this idealist movement a renewal of the teleological picture of nature and of history it is aimed oriented and achieving there is potency that is being actualized in the process then you get the phenomenal Astrium of people like Berkeley and Kant saying that mechanistic science tells us about appearance but not about reality so you get those three other kinds of reaction which we've already taken in our stride well now comes the idealist and what it is doing of course is riding piggyback on the earlier phenomena list view of science and particularly on the influence of kant particularly on the influence of current so keep that in mind first of all the reaction against mechanistic science second it's also a reaction against the dogmatic rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th century the kind of foundationalist approach that Descartes initiated with his first principles and thence deductive reasoning all the way until you've got the whole system worked out now that sort of process that sort of methodology may have been appropriate when you thought that this was a strictly mathematically ordered universe a mathematical method fitting a mathematical universe but if what you have is a developmental organic kind of process then you need a different kind of method and here we all notice it is cants transcendental method that is the key so we'll come back to that in just a moment a transcendental method a third these German idealists are continuing Kant's Copernican revolution and that immediately rides on the notion of a transcendental method that focuses on the constructive contribution of the self there's a a cants Copernican revolution that is to say the key to reality a key to understanding reality is the role of the self the role of the subjective self the human spirit now I said that Kant leads you into romanticism well here it is yes he the role of the creative self but this sum comes in in different ways and you might turn think of it as the the viewer here the observer the thinker whatever looking through the lens of his/her own self-consciousness at the screen of reality as a whole so from this standpoint you see things through what the self consciousness of the human spirit provides put it another way if we can with the transcendental method uncover beneath all of the particulars of human experience the underlying essence of what self consciousness is of what the self is then we can in that light see the reality as it were the reality of the whole projected on the screen have you played with making shadow images in the dark did you do that as a kid with a flashlight in your bed where you will shine a light on the ceiling and make some sort of crazy figure with your fingers and you'll get a projected huge image there well you can think what Hegel is doing as making those sorts of images Yesi projecting an image of the self on the reality as a whole if you like creating the universe and the image of the self creating the whole of reality in one's own image the key to reality is one's own self consciousness now if that is the case it's going to follow that the structures of human self of human consciousness are also the structures of reality or to put it in content language the categories of understanding are the categories of reality oh you're breaking the phenomenal neuronal distinction right yes eh if there is indeed some sort of a pre formation whereby the forming of the self is in the image of reality you see then by understanding the stretches of the self we can understand the structures of reality and that's precisely what these people are trying to do so the transcendental method is an attempt to provide a description of the process of self understanding or self consciousness so that the development of the self consciousness is a microcosm of the development of the consciousness of the absolute spirit the all-inclusive ground of being anything and immediately I say that you begin to see that this idealism is going to be a monistic idealism there is one all-inclusive ground of being of which the self-consciousness is simply a microcosm now let me let me back up with one more statement then this may help and back up to this we've we've observed during the modern period from Descartes on and culminating in Kant the ongoing question about the nature of the self what am i or a thinking thing well Locke isn't so sure Hume finds only a bundle of perceptions with nothing to unify it can't finds that there is this synthetic unity of a perception whereby there is some sort of unification of the field of consciousness and the scheme it ization of the understanding brings the unification of the whole of one's experience and thinking but you notice that that is not an underlying substantive entity that is the unified self it is the structuring of consciousness that is the unifier right it's the structuring of the consciousness that's the unifying now that's the point of departure for the German idealists they're not looking for some mind substance some soul substance in the Cartesian sense they're not looking for a for immortal souls in the Platonic sense that have some eternal pre-existence and so on and so forth now what they're doing is trying to understand the self as structured self consciousness you see that's the notion of the self what is it that unifies all of the diversity zuv experience what is the unifying action of the self how you're going to characterize this self-consciousness and as you see from what I've written on the board if self-consciousness is the key to reality and the question is well what is the essential central fundamental characteristic of self consciousness of which everything else is just a function or a byproduct then you get four different answers in effect her moral consciousness he takes off from the critique of practical reason in shelling it's what Kant calls the teleological in the critique of judgment the aesthetic consciousness shelling is the major philosopher of German Romanticism for Schleiermacher Friedrich Schleiermacher it's the religious consciousness and Schleiermacher is the great 19th century theologian building his theology as a projection of religious experience if you like romanticism in theology these are romanticist theologian and what Hagel does is simply to say no it's this conceptual capacity that we have the ongoing process of trying to grasp the concept of being itself yes that's what marks the developing consciousness so in trying to to grasp more and more fully the concept of my self I'm grasping more and more fully the concept of being itself the totality so you have to distinguish between the the finite self and the absolute self absolute in the sense of sense of the one all-inclusive ground of me okay and this is where the phrase ground of being begins to pick up you find it in Schreyer marker and Hegel and so forth okay no let me pause there for a question comment Kristin I figured I might that's why I kept going the hinge point of all these things mean that one of the hinge points of all these idealist is that there is some sort of unity within itself yeah yeah yeah the emphasis here is on the unity of the self and immediately you've got two unified all-inclusive one absolute self yeah so what you get here is a monistic idealism a monastic metaphysic everything is ultimately one yeah built in this image right the unity of the self honesty as opposed the pantheistic well the the term monism is simply saying reality is one all-inclusive being pantheistic is the religious shape that would take identifying the one as God now the term pantheism you'll find maybe a little too heavy-handed for these guys particularly for Hegel who isn't happy with pantheism but the term pain in theism is perhaps more applicable now the difference is the little Greek preposition n which means in so rather than saying everything is God and God is everything everything is in God is they but the totality of finite things does not exhaust the totality of God there is room for more process yeah pantheism in Spinoza has a static universe is it has the mechanistic static order this is a dynamic open-ended teleological process David now say that again I'm not quite sure I got the question yes yes yeah incant the unity of the self which is this theme okay in count the unity of the self is not found simply by listing forms and categories but it's found in terms of what he calls that synthetic unity notice the term synthetic unity of a perception yes a and then the schema dies Asian of the 12 categories in relationship to the form of time now notice in both cases both the synthetic unity and the schema dies Asian this is a functional unity the self is unified in action yes not in just being but in thinking in experiencing that's why I say self consciousness yes II and I think that's important too to notice that it's a functional unity we were functionally unified because what is the unifying factor in the self-consciousness in these cases well this is the functional unity these are the functional units yes a it's those functions which unify respectively for the particular philosopher reflect back into John Locke and his discussion of personal identity yes he what is it which gives the unity of the self through a period of time for Locke and his answer is simply memory let's say the past experiences which are associated with in my present experience my present memory of the past yes I so that too is sort of a functional unity and it's a somewhat speculative thing that he as to whether there is an underlying soul substance you'd rather think so but can't prove it as clearly as Descartes thought he could so this notion of functional unity I think is is important yeah okay anything else there let me let me sum this up then what we're going to find what we're going to find is first a new scientific model more organic and developmental if you like evolutionary because of course evolutionary theory came in with the developmental biology developmental biology both the micro and the macro level at the micro level the beginnings of genetics the macro level evolutionary biology about a new scientific model developmental a new philosophical method the begins with the transcendental method but comes to be referred to as a phenomenological method phenomenology that's the method what is the title of Hegel's major work the phenomenology of mind the phenomenology of mind and what is the dominant European philosophy in the night in the 20th century it is phenomenology a methodological approach it's the method underlying existentialism underlying hermeneutical theory and so forth now watch this term phenomenology it is not the same as phenomenalism and a moment's reflection will help you see why some of you who have been using the terms interchangeably were not thinking there's a difference between an ism and the logic an ism is a position a theory phenomenalism is the view that all we know is appearances a lodging is a study of a science of a methodological thing Yesi now phenomenology then okay is the study of the phenomena ah not saying only phenomena can be no but it's saying that we start with a study of the phenomena get the difference yes because if you're trying to get at the structure of the self what is it that is the functional structuring that goes on in the development of consciousness and self-consciousness you see but you have to describe the process don't you you have to describe the phenomena of developing consciousness so the method is phenomenological well now in 20th century the term is fairly common and even though you find some unfill esophagus people using the term interchangeably with phenomenalism the two are very very different you find its proper use in the fray in a phrase like phenomenology of religion yes a which is used in two senses one is a phenomenology of religious experience describing the phenomena of religious experience another is phenomenology of religion is describing beliefs and practices the phenomena that social occult level phenomenology it's a descriptive method it's not an attempt to prove to prove something with demonstrative arguments the old demonstrative arguments of the Descartes Locke tradition no that's passed that was part of dogmatic metaphysics is it what you have is a descriptive method and the conclusion to an effective description is not therefore such-and-such QED the conclusion to an effective description is oh I see yeah that's the way it is you see okay because what you're doing with your description is saying to somebody hey come and look at this see what I see nothing and the validity of this description is underscored when you get that consensual social process yes a the interpersonal agreement about what indeed is properly being described so it's a descriptive approach rather than a demonstrative approach so when you read Hegel don't say to yourself well what is he proven what's this piece about master and servant as he proven anything not trying to prove anything he's just trying to describe the interpersonal dynamics by virtue of which the master becomes aware of himself as master and the servant becomes aware of herself and servant is it the developing self awareness self consciousness described but that is just a shadowy range of the whole or the whole as a shadow image road you see microcosm macrocosm and let me pause there with one other footnote that strikes me I hadn't thought of this particularly before last fall when we got started with the pre-socratics I was trying to point out that from before the beginnings of philosophy back in the Greek poets Homer has he odd so forth there is an idea of ordered unity such that the ordering of the moral life of an individual is a microcosm of the ordered justice of a city-state which is a microcosm of the ordered unity of the cosmos remember so that the the self morally ordered and right the just individual is a microcosm of an ordered cosmos now notice how radical the change disjunction in a way it's coming back to that see you see the ordered unity of the self is a microcosm of the ordered unity of reality as a whole but for the Greek philosophers it was developed in terms of the ordered unity of the physical universe oh now it's in terms of the ordered universe of the world of ideas the world of culture of art of religion but the idea of the self being a microcosm of the whole still here so don't be surprised if in Hegel reading about Hegel you run into the notion of the Lagos you see because Hegel in his religious writing reintroduce the Lagos concept which had been eclipsed during the mechanistic age which had no teleology okay what did I say then a new scientific model a new philosophical method phenomenological description alright a new logic a new logic because what we have had is a logic of the syllogism syllogistic logic what we are going to get is a logic of process and that logic of process is dialectic the cell gistic logic is a logic of unchanging universals why well you know the basic rule of the simple categorical syllogism all a is B all B is C therefore all a is C there you see the basic rule of the syllogism is that there is a middle term and the middle term must be universally extended at least once that is to say B must be universal all be at least once in order that B this B this particular beam can be part of this otherwise is no connection you got to have a connective the connective has to be about a universal no of course it can be about a universal class of people but it would have to be a class of people unchanging in a certain respect yes they in other words you've got to have unchanging universals of some sort at least unchanging universal concepts so this logic was devised which device was organized developed in by Aristotle with his emphasis you see on universals unchanging universal concepts classes species oh but now if we've got to developmental concept in science and in history you see how are you going to think about what's going on in the developmental process obviously that's going to raise the question are there any universals and Hegel is going to have to restructure the whole theory of universals he doesn't ditch it he restructures it and he's pretty close to Aristotle but in restructuring it he he still has to work with a logic of process rather than the logic of permanence you know think of the pre-socratics where they antithesis between Heraclitus and Parmenides is the antithesis between Universal change universal commoners well now we're using moving to the notion that that change is more ultimate than permanence change is more ultimate than when we get to Hegel I'll make some comments about his logic it's sometimes said that by people who haven't read Hegel's logic that he rejects the law of non-contradiction he does not explicitly he does not he simply regards it as trivial in a world of change never step into the same river twice and so you have trouble with the law of non-contradiction at the same time and in the same respect so the logic of process dialectic and dialectic you remember is the sort of thinking that says yes no yes a and then brings the two together in a synthesis thesis antithesis synthesis yes no well here it is and the problem is to grasp this then the idea is that the process of thought which is the starting point the process of thought is like a mental meandering finding your way through a whole maze of ideas not this this that's a little bit further but yeah we need this this yes a a mental meandering that leads to a fuller and fuller understanding the unfolding concept and applied to history that's the view that history tends to have those swings of the pendulum were now seeing the conservative reaction in the former Soviet Union and then there will be a modified and circles so a dialectical process a new logic therefore also a new epistemology the new epistemology what we had back in the 17th century 18th century was a representational theory of knowledge nothing representational ideas that are subjective that stand for all but in these German idealists ideas are no longer representations static representations in the mind ideas arise in dynamic interaction with the world of which were part with the larger world yes and so what you have is an epistemology that stresses direct awareness within which there is a gradual clarifying of ideas clarifying of concepts direct awareness gradual clarification will see that more explicitly as we get to Hegel and the new metaphysic well that's what we've been talking about how you're going to describe the new metaphysic it's idealism rather than materialism rather than dualism its idealism everything is of the nature of mind spirit self it is a developmental kind of monism if you like you can call it an an evolutionary idealism not all evolutionary thinking is naturalistic these were evolutionary idealists everything is moving towards the full actualization of that spiritual life and vitality which underlies everything else it's latent it's coming out evolutionary idealism it's sometimes spoken of as eminent istic in that any divine being absolute ground of being is imminent in the entirety that has profound theological consequences it means that there is no trend Cendant God who who has to reveal himself to a creatures who are external to himself so there's no such thing as special revelation because if the divine is imminent then the divine self-consciousness welds up within your self-consciousness yes so there is no such thing as special revelation acts of Revelation there is no such thing as ex nihilo creation there is no such thing as a historic act of redemption it's all process from within imminent there's no unique incarnation how can there be if there isn't a transcendent God to incarnate himself the Incarnation is simply a symbol for talking of the imminence of the Divine in everything so watch for this when we get to Hegel's philosophy of religion imminent ISM the the metaphysic is sometimes described as gradualism that is to say everything in existence is to some degree mind spirit consciousness the old notion of degrees of being all up the hierarchy if they is now translated into a developmental process the process of evolution is the development of greater degrees in the graduated process greater degrees of mine spirit this is part of the evolutionary optimism and for Hegel the fullest manifestation of spirit comes out in German culture where else would you expect yeah this was the age of nationalism why because one is nationalism it's the embodiment the full self-discovery self realization of the identity of the spirit of a people nationalism is a product or Romanticism a product of this German idealism and then I was going to say it's romanticism well I think you already see that when Wordsworth ODEs to daffodils and your heart dances with the daffodils that's not just metaphor you think the daffodils dance is a free creative manifestation of our certain degree of creative spirit at work they are that is at work more fully in your heart and so your heart responding to the stimulus joins in one great chorus of dance romanticism well this is where we're going with German idealism now what I'd like to do is to say it commenter two about these other figures questions do do you get the picture that I've been trying to paint I think if you can grasp this and the other illustrations that I'm going to use you'll find that reading the bits and pieces of Hegel that we have makes sense but Reed Stumpf first he'll give you more of an over picture though what he does is to give you an almost dead over picture as if it's a logical system rather than a developmental process the thing that does it best I think it brief compasses this though I'm indebted as well to a book on Hegel by a graduate of ours Merrill Westfall w est pH al who teaches at Fordham University in the Bronx and and is a first-rate Hagel scholar he's been president of the Hegel Society of America but his book is very very helpful catching this okay as I was saying the conception of what unifies the self what is the function which is the dominant unifying function the all absorbing function of the self Viktor who died in 1814 and incidentally was an armored with the figure of Napoleon the figure on the white horse marching through Europe this is the romanticist figure embodying so much yes a victor is raising the question of what is the ground that underlies all our experience what is it that is the precondition to use the Kantian term the precondition that makes human type experience possible that makes our consciousness the way it is now that's the good Kantian question he rejects dogmatic metaphysics as did cut he opts for a transcendental method as did cut and the thing that he finds as he describes the experience of the self is that the nature of a the self comes through prominently as that of a moral being where the will is the dominant and most revealing faculty now interestingly his phenomenological description that leads to that is more of a description of the epistemological side he poses for instance the the old question from Descartes how do I know that material bodies exist till one Berkeley would have been happy for that how do you know that material bodies exist everything and his initial response of course is a is a description of the skepticism that results from people like Berkeley and he'll I don't know that physical bodies exist but in my moral struggle my inner moral struggle between duty and desire between acting out of duty and just following my inclinations in the world around me I find that my moral life post joints there's that term again we had an in can't it posits the existence of a non self there is opposed to the moral life of the self so that it's in the moral life where we find the opposite of the moral will the opposite of the moral will is that which is positive is a positive by the well as it were there is no proof that a physical non-self world exists but whatever it is in that non self it stands in sort of a dialectical opposition to the south as we know it in the moral life don't wait so then if we're going to talk about the nature of reality what is it going to be that is to say if the self consciousness is the key to reality and this lens allows me to project a picture of reality on the overall screen you see what am I going to say about the nature of reality well obviously in the reality as a whole there is no antithesis to the self you can't have this as both a and non a and what is projected is that it comes out as ego absolute ego absolute will that is to say reality as a whole has has the what we would call the co native characteristics yes in varying degrees in humans there is conscious will moral will in animal life instinctual drive in vegetative life the constant earth thrust of things ground ground sloth even the resistance that even inanimate things offer to extraneous forces in all of these cases what you see is manifestations of will or pre developments of will in opposition to that which is other than itself the rock that resists disintegration the plant that thrusts itself up through the soil the animal with his instinct Drive and fight to survive and the human willing to act out of duty rather than just giving it to inclination so his conception comes out that way or and the way in which he pictures it then is this sort of manner what you have the ultimate reality is absolute ego manifested in finite ego and finite non ego okay now what we observe in the phenomenal realm is that enter ptosis ego voz is not eco so the phenomenological description describes this we know the reality of the thriving of wit we don't know the reality of physical non-ego that's just posited and so projecting this on the screen absolute ego is the nature of reality well right Miceli tried Miceli as i said his point of departure is more the critique of judgment and the critique of practical reason the focus is on the the feeling one has of oneness with nature the feeling of the ongoing teleology of which our aesthetic experience is apparent so forth all right so showing writes about the philosophy of nature in terms of an evolutionary idealism the physical world is at an early stage in its gradual evolution of living conscious spirit a nature is a living force impulsive creative bursting out with novelty and when he turns to philosophy of mind he sees the same sort of thing in in human culture there is a low level of creativity and emerging drive for novelty in theoretical thought sense perception theoretical knowledge there is more of this creative drive going on in the practical realm the moral and the political as Fichte said but its fullest manifestation is in the aesthetic realm where the contemplative of the first level perception is combined with the active dimension of the second the moral level action and contemplation combined in creative art creative vitality imaginative creating new worlds of experience and so he sees three traces phenomenologically this kind of thing and concludes the reality itself is overall vast creative we're not creative well creative drive emphasis on feeling in the unfolding of the absolute in the course of history so you get those two following very much the the same kind of methodological process very much the same flaw marker well shelling by the way was a member of the romanticist circle first at llena JEA in germany then at berlin in berlin he was joined by Schleiermacher who was a pastor from a piety SPAC round hospital chaplain and so forth and he finds religious consciousness the key he objects to Kant reducing religion to little more than ethics because religion experient religious experience as any pastor knows is far far more than simply ethical Willi the moral will religious experience is of absolute dependence on the divine and that's his definition of the very essence of Christian piety it's a sins of absolute dependence on the divine came from a pious background but for that to be the case absolute dependence God is not another individual being along with us beings God is not transcendent God is being itself the ground of all being but he doesn't want that to imply Spinoza's pantheism Spinoza like the 18th century had an atomistic view of individuals as discrete isolated from each other insulated Schreyer marker goes for a more relational view I'm not externally related to other things with just a channel of continuity going through me this rather an organic relationship the self is then defined what I am what is being unified in this religious experience is that whole network of relationships here am i with relationships of a genetic sort to parents relationships of a social sort to friends associates environment relationships of an emotional sort to everything imaginable you see and the unifying core of this is a sense of absolute dependence wherever these vectors go they express dependence on dependence of one sort and another bring them all together and the unified core is absolute dependence on being itself and these finite dependencies are just finite aspects of the whole so God is the all-embracing ground of being and what he tried to do of course was therefore to articulate a theology to define Christian theological concepts in these terms ISM and the language of theology therefore becomes symbolic rather than being taken in some literal well it do you see what's going on phenomenological description of the functional unity of self-consciousness okay with the conclusion that what we discover in the self is simply a microcosm of the whole which is then projected as the nature of reality okay we'll pick it up there and rerun a little bit of this next time as we break into Higa limbs

Channel: wheatoncollege

Views: 64,758

Rating: 4.8706799 out of 5

Keywords: wheaton, college, illinois, A History Of Philosophy, Arthur F. Holmes

Id: DNA0mrEeHXY

Length: 61min 40sec (3700 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015