KANT AND THE HISTORICAL TURN This page intentionally left blank Kant and the Historical Turn Philosophy as Critical Interpretation KARL AMERIKS CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–920533–7 978–0–19–920533–2 ISBN 0–19–920534–5 (Pbk.) 978–0–19–920534–9 (Pbk.) 13579108642 Acknowledgements I thank the editors of Oxford University Press, and especially Peter Momtchiloff, for invaluable assistance with this volume. For helpful last-minute assistance I am indebted to Thomas Mulherin and Megan Halteman. For stimulation on countless philosophical points I am deeply indebted to the audiences at which versions of the chapters were delivered, and especially to my colleagues at Notre Dame and at an NEH Summer Institute on Nature, Art, and Politics after Kant: Re-Evaluating German Romanticism, held at Colorado State University. Helpful financial assistance was provided by a grant from the Earhart Foundation and a timely leave from the University of Notre Dame. Except for selections that have appeared before only in a German version, materials from the chapters below have been changed only to a slight extent, primarily to update references and standardize format. I acknowledge permission to reprint materials from the fol- lowing publications: Chapter 1. ‘Text and Context: Hermeneutical Prolegomena to Interpreting a Kant Text’, in Dieter Schonecker¨ and Thomas Zwenger (eds.), Kant verstehen/ Understanding Kant (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 11–31. Chapter 2. ‘Apperzeption und Subjekt. Kants Lehre vom Ich’, in Dieter H. Heidemann and Kristina Engelhard (eds.), Warum Kant heute? Systemat- ische Bedeutung und Rezeption seiner Philosophie in der Gegenwart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 76–99. Chapter 3. ‘Idealism from Kant to Berkeley’, in Stephen Gersh and Dermot Moran (eds.), Eriugena, Berkeley and the Idealist Tradition, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 244–68. Chapter 4. ‘Kant und das Problem der moralischen Motivation’, in Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (eds.), Kants Ethik, (Paderborn: Mentis, 2004), 97–116; ‘Kant and Motivational Externalism’, in Heiner Klemme, Manfred Kuhn,¨ and Dieter Schonecker¨ (eds.), Moralische Motivation. Kant und die Alternativen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2005), forthcoming. Chapter 5. ‘A Commonsense Kant?’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79 (2005), 19–45. Chapter 6. ‘The Critique of Metaphysics: The Structure and Fate of Kant’s Dia- lectic’, in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 269–302. vi Acknowledgements Chapter 7. ‘Reinhold’s First Letters on Kant’, (Archivo di Filosofia (2005), pp. 1–21; and ‘Introduction’, in Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. ix–xxxv. Chapter 8. ‘Reinhold on Systematicity, Popularity and ‘‘The Historical Turn’’ ’, in Rolf Ahlers (ed.), System and Context. Early Romantic and Early Idealistic Constellations/System und Kontext. Fr¨uhromantische und Fr¨uhidealistische Kon- stellationen, The New Athenaeum, 7 (2004), 109–38; ‘Reinhold uber¨ System- atik, Popularit¨ at¨ und die ‘‘Historische Wende’’ ’, in Martin Bondeli and Aless- andro Lazzari (eds.), Philosophie ohne Beynamen. System, Freiheit und Geschichte im Denken Karl Leonhard Reinholds (Basle: Schwabe, 2004), 303–33. Chapter 9. ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics: New Perspectives on its Response to Kant and Romanticism’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 45/46 (2002), 72–92. Chapter 10. ‘The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 258–81. Chapter 11. ‘On Beiser’s German Idealism’, Inquiry, 47 (2004), 86–98. Chapter 12. ‘The Key Role of Selbstgef¨uhl in Philosophy’s Aesthetic and Histor- ical Turns’, Critical Horizons, 5 (2004), 27–52; ‘Die Schlusselrolle¨ des Selb- stgef¨uhls in der asthetischen¨ und historischen Wende der Philosophie’, in Thomas Grundmann et al. (eds.), Anatomie der Subjektivitat¨ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), 389–416. Chapter 13. ‘Konstellationsforschung und die kopernikanische Wende’, in Mar- tin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm (eds.), Konstellationsforschung (Munich: Suhrkamp, 2005), 101–24; ‘Response to Ulrich Johannes Schneider’, in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Teaching New Histories of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton Center for the Study of Human Values, 2004), 295–305, 383–5. Contents Introduction: On the Very Notion of a Historical Turn in Philosophy 1 I. KANT AND AFTER 1. Text and Context: Hermeneutical Prolegomena to Interpreting a Kant Text 33 2. Kantian Apperception and the Non-Cartesian Subject 51 3. Idealism from Kant to Berkeley 67 4. Kant, Hume, and the Problem of Moral Motivation 89 5. A Common-Sense Kant? 108 6. The Critique of Metaphysics: The Structure and Fate of Kant’s Dialectic 134 II. REINHOLD AND AFTER 7. Reinhold’s First Letters on Kant 163 8. Reinhold on Systematicity, Popularity, and the Historical Turn 185 III. HEGEL AND AFTER 9. Hegel’s Aesthetics: New Perspectives on its Response to Kant and Romanticism 209 10. The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard 231 IV. CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS 11. On Beiser’s German Idealism 257 12. The Key Role of Selbstgef¨uhl in Philosophy’s Aesthetic and Historical Turns 269 13. Historical Constellations and Copernican Contexts 289 Bibliography of Works Cited 307 Index 329 This page intentionally left blank Introduction: On the Very Notion of a Historical Turn in Philosophy Plainly put: the idea of science is research; that of philosophy is inter- pretation [Deutung]. In this remains the great, perhaps the eternal paradox: philosophy, ever and always and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a key to interpretation: nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the ciphers [Ratselfiguren¨ ] of what is and their wondrous entwinings. The history of philosophy is nothing other than the history of such entwinings. That is why it reaches so few ‘results’, why it must always begin anew, and why it cannot do without the slightest thread which earlier times have spun, and which perhaps completes the literature that might transform the ciphers into a text.¹ I. BACKGROUND 1. An Old Dichotomy on History The steady growth of interest in historical development, and in the historical dimension of philosophy in particular, is a phenomenon that calls for explana- tion. Even more than the exact sciences, philosophy has generally striven to be a discipline that escapes the contingencies of time, or at least the limitations of particular historical frameworks and empirical disciplines. This is true not only of ancient and medieval philosophy but also of the modern philosophical systems that came with the rise of the ‘new physics’ in the era of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Very much the same kind of commitment to ahistorical procedures and indubitable first truths can be found at the beginning of each of the main phases of modern philosophy: in the programs of the rationalists and empiricists, of the ¹ Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), i. 334. Cited in Fred Rush, ‘Conceptual Foundations of Early Critical Theory’, in Fred Rush (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33. 2 Introduction Kantians and the post-Kantian German Idealists, and of the first positivists, phe- nomenologists, and analytic philosophers.² In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, there arose a very differ- ent perspective, a historicist position that was generated in large part by a popular interest in the radical