THE TEMPORAL TURN IN GERMAN IDEALISM: HEGEL AND AFTER

by

JOHN McCUMBER The University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT Hegel’s rejection of the Kantian thing-in-itself makes the “an sich” an ingredient in experience—that about a thing which is not yet present to us is what it is “an sich.” Hegel bars thus any philosophical appeal to anything construed as atemporal, a path which I argue was also taken by Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Habermas. Unlike them, however, Hegel pursues a project of systematic philosophy, which now consists in showing how temporal things mutually support one another. The recent Continental philosophers I discuss do not share this systematic conception; hence some of their most distinctive insights and problems.

“German Idealism” means, at its broadest, post-Kantian German phi- losophy through Hegel (on whom this essay will concentrate). This tradition is, perhaps next to Neoplatonism, the least understood of phi- losophy’s major traditions. Indeed, the name “German Idealism” itself is somewhat deceptive. German Idealists did not, by and large, believe that esse ist percipi —and so G. E. Moore’s “ Refutation of Idealism” missed them completely. 1 They are also not “German,” if only because national philosophies are not philosophies at all. Not only is the name “ German Idealism” misleading; my above characterization of it is as well. While it is true that the German Idealists, including as major Ž gures Fichte and Schelling, as well as Hegel, came after Kant, there is an enormous gulf between them and him—every bit as wide as, indeed I will argue wider than, the gulf that yawned between Descartes and the Scholastics he studied at La Flêche. No subsequent break in philosophy has been so wide; and to say that German Idealism ended with Hegel is thus as tendentious as saying that it took o V from Kant. But if German Idealism did not end with Hegel, indeed has not ended at all, then there is no “legacy of German Idealism,” not at least in the sense that it has died and

Research in Phenomelogy , 32 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2002 the temporal turn in german idealism 45 bequeathed something to us. We are all today German Idealists, car- rying on—with di Verences—the basic elements of a philosophical approach that is very much alive. The most appropriate German Idealist for a paper undertaking to argue the thesis sketched above is the one furthest from Kant and closest to us: Hegel.

Hegel’s Break with Kant Descartes famously broke with the philosophical tradition he inherited by seeking certainty not in what is (including in Who Am), but in who thinks: the cogito, and whatever followed necessarily from it, was to be the “unshakeable foundation” that metaphysics had sought for so long. But in spite of the radicality of this break with previous philosophy, it has its limits: Descartes is still seeking a foundation, and he still wants it to be unshakeable. So does Kant, though the “unshakeability” of his foundation has mutated into a moral dimension. In his (unusually succinct) letter to Kästner of August 5, l790, Kant puts his attitude towards metaphysics thus: “ my e Vorts ... in no way aim to work against the philosophy of Leibniz and Wol V.... I aim to achieve the same end, but by a detour which in my opinion those great men held to be super  uous.”2 The end is to retain the content of metaphysics—the ideas that were traditionally exhibited in it and the moral guidance that they bring. The critical “ detour” is to destroy the claim that those ideas have objective referents, studying them merely insofar as they reside within the subject: as objects of critique, the systematic demarcation of the faculties. What for Leibniz and Wol V were concepts with objective referents, for Kant were Ideas of Reason, noumena. Kant thus locates his unshake- able foundation within the mind—in the Ideas created by, and resi- dent within, Reason. This brings him a problem, however, because the contents of the human mind, if they are truly unshakeable, can- not be in time—everything in time comes to be, passes away, and otherwise trembles. The contents of Reason—the Ideas of such non- empirical entities as God, the soul, and immortality— are all outside time and therefore can only be thought as possibilities, not known. Their necessity, as I said above, is moral rather than cognitive. What can be known of our minds then is, strictly speaking, their empirical side: not the faculties themselves but their “employments,”