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The Fabric of Thought The Fabric of Thought: Reason, Language and Experience in German Philosophy from Hamann to Habermas Jonathan Gray A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervised by: Professor Andrew Bowie Royal Holloway, University of London August 2016 For my father, Bill Gray, who gave me words and worlds. Declaration of Authorship I, Jonathan Gray, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Jonathan Gray 1st August 2016 i ii Abstract This thesis examines aspects of the relationship between reason, language and experience by means of an engagement with the legacy of the eighteenth century “linguistic turn” in German philosophy. The examination begins with the emergence of the idea of “pure reason”, including efforts to establish a calculus of thought inspired by innovations in mathematics and the natural sciences. These aspirations to formalise and mechanise reason have parallels with the “thin” conception of rationality in analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Hamann and Herder’s works provide the basis for an alternative “thick” conception of language as a socially and historically situated “fabric of thought” which provides the conditions of possibility for both reason and experience. This conception has advantages over the twentieth century linguistic turn in accounting for how language structures experience and sustains social worlds, because the latter maintains a disproportionate focus on what Charles Taylor describes as language’s “designative” and “information-encoding” capacities. The works of the Early German Romantics and Nietzsche provide resources for a richer and more ambitious vision for the role of philosophy in creatively reshaping this fabric, articulating new ideals, and opening up horizons for new social, cultural and political ways of being. Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s work is used to suggest how human beings simultaneously shape and are shaped by language, how languages give form to experience, and how it is that language can be creatively reshaped in response to experience. Finally, the thesis examines how debates between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Habermas’s critical theory echo Hamann’s encounter with Kant. These thinkers broaden the scope of what should be considered relevant to philosophy as a form of critical social and cultural praxis. iii iv Table of Contents 1. Why A History of Philosophy? ............................................................................................................... 1 Rethinking the Relationship Between Reason, Language and Experience .............................................. 1 History, Philosophy and Hermeneutical Fictions ..................................................................................... 4 Beginning in the Middle: Hamann’s 1759 Letter to Kant ...................................................................... 15 2. The Purification of Reason: Leibniz to Frege .................................................................................... 24 The Prehistory of Pure Reason ............................................................................................................... 24 “Let us Calculate!” ................................................................................................................................. 29 The Legacy of Leibniz and Wolff from Kant to Frege ........................................................................... 44 3. The Limits of Pure Reason: Kant, Hamann, Herder ......................................................................... 54 Hamann and Herder on the Purification of Reason ............................................................................... 55 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason .............................................................................................................. 66 Hamann and Herder’s Metacritiques of Kant ........................................................................................ 75 4. Conceptual Cartographies: Wittgenstein and the Analytic Linguistic Turn ................................... 87 The Linguistic Turn in Analytic Philosophy .......................................................................................... 88 The Tractatus and Ideal Language Philosophy ...................................................................................... 90 The Investigations and Natural Language Philosophy ........................................................................... 96 The Limits of the Analytic Linguistic Turn .......................................................................................... 115 5. Remediating Rationality: Hamann, Herder and the German Linguistic Turn ............................ 122 Language in the Air .............................................................................................................................. 123 Hamann on Language, Creation and Revelation .................................................................................. 136 Herder on Language, Consciousness and Culture ................................................................................ 149 Hamann and Herder’s Metacritical Philosophies of Language ............................................................ 158 6. The Plasticity of Thought: Novalis to Nietzsche ............................................................................... 178 The Early German Romantics on the Movement and Musicality of Reason ....................................... 179 Nietzsche on the Fabrication of Linguistic Worlds .............................................................................. 195 7. Appropriating Language: Heidegger and Gadamer ........................................................................ 229 Heidegger on the Appropriation of Language ...................................................................................... 229 Gadamer on Bildung and Linguistic Tradition ..................................................................................... 252 8. Shaping and Being Shaped: The Gadamer-Habermas Debates ..................................................... 264 Habermas on the Detranscendentalisation of Reason .......................................................................... 265 Habermas’s Critique of the Hermeneutic Claim to Universality ......................................................... 274 Gadamer’s Metacritical Response to Habermas’s Critique .................................................................. 284 Two Kinds of Universality, Two Kinds of Modesty ............................................................................ 291 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 302 Philosophical Implications ................................................................................................................... 305 Metaphilosophical Implications ........................................................................................................... 315 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................ 334 v 0 1. Why A History of Philosophy? “[A] critique of philosophizing reason cannot succeed without a history of philosophy.” – Friedrich Schlegel (Frank, 2004: 13-14) In this introduction I will do three things. Firstly, I will briefly introduce some of the central philosophical concerns about the relationship between reason, language and experience which motivate this inquiry. Secondly, I will discuss how engagements with the history of philosophy might contribute to enriching contemporary debates about these concerns. Thirdly, I will explain why I believe that the particular period of German philosophy that I engage with makes such an important contribution, and why I have chosen Hamann’s 1759 public letter to Kant as my starting point. Rethinking the Relationship Between Reason, Language and Experience In this thesis I examine how the legacy of the eighteenth century “linguistic turn” in German philosophy can contribute to advancing contemporary debates about the relationship between reason, language and experience. The thesis mobilises material which remains under-represented and under-appreciated in Anglophone philosophy in order to provide an alternative constellation of arguments and ideas which I contend has significant advantages over other much more familiar histories of philosophical debates around these topics. This constellation provides theoretical resources which can be used to provide a much more compelling account of how reason, language and experience 1 The Fabric of Thought: Reason, Language and Experience in German Philosophy from Hamann to Habermas are related than other available accounts in contemporary Anglophone philosophy – including the legacy of classic debates between rationalism and empiricism on the one hand, and the legacy of the twentieth century linguistic turn in analytic philosophy on the other. What is reason? What is experience? And how are they related? In Anglophone history of philosophy textbooks, debates about reason and experience are often related with reference to epistemological disputes between rationalist philosophers who place an emphasis on a priori structures of knowledge (such as Descartes) and empiricist philosophers who
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