The 19^th Century:

Idealism & Positivism

What is really real — and where is it located?...

Think of this as a discussion of majority and minority opinions.
The “dominant” view, held by most people in the 19^th century is Idealism, pretty much an elaboration of the Rationalist line of Modern thought, pretty much associated with a number of main-line German philosophers. As usual, three of them: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; as usual, one of ‘em (Hegel) developed a line that was considered provocative by another (Schelling — and just about everyone else, including the government...); neither Schelling nor Hegel liked Fichte, who was (in a sort neat, retro way) regarded as a (religious) heretic. Generally, Idealism locates the really real in the construction of the universe from a constellation of sensible impressions.
The opposing “minority opinion” took one form or another of a Realism — in this instance, the idea that, to some extent or other, there is that, independent of the constucting mind, which is completely real, can be measured to some extent, and can be meaningfully described and manipulated within limits.
By far the most influential of these views is Idealism.

Idealism

Idealism, in general, takes the view that what we call the world, or the universe (whatever) is a constellation of events in our experience. This can be asserted in a stronger way — this is to deny any knowledge of an outer reality at all. This would be the most extreme sort of Cartesian view, and the late-19^th century actually produced folks of this sort, for whom ordinary experience was simply wrong. All that was really real, was our construction of a universe from our experiences; assertions about any sort of actual reality independent of our individual minds was simply doubtful. Interestingly, just about every name I can associate with such views is that of a person known to be pretty twitchy, but there you are. Let’s call this extreme Idealism an ontological Idealism: Ideas are (that is, they are in some sense beings, ta onta).

There is a less extreme form of Idealism; let’s call it metaphysical Idealism. It entails an ontological Realism, used not as this term is used in ancient and mediæval philosophy; here we mean, there really are entities, things that are in themselves, ta onta, existing independently of our thinking about them. This is Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, noted before. Basically, while there are things that exist independently of me, I can know them only as they are present to me in consciousness, under some sort of structure of the mind or whatever. That is, Idealism is merely a way to explain how there is something rather than nothing to me, and how it is possible for me to know it.

Both these mainline possibilities are inherent in Modern philosophy from its inception more or less at the outset of the 17^th century. Variant precursors are easily found in all the main thinkers we have mentioned. Kant is usually considered the person who makes clear the fundamental distinction (at least; people have been claiming to find holes big enough to drive an 18-wheeler through pretty much since Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason [a/k/a “the first Critique”; there are two more...]).

German Idealism

Kant’s younger contemporary — say, “GenX” to Kant’s “GenB-for-Boomer”, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is generally considered the first of the Big Name German Idealists. Kant thought Fichte was an All Right Guy initially, developing the Kantian line, but rescinded that approbation later; Fichte was doing something pretty much on his own. Fichte’s idealism took the extreme form, and not surprisingly, Fichte seems to have been a bit twitchy (indulge in some pop-psychology; look at the picture...).

Fichte is really much better known for his Addresses to the German Nation. Even today, this is what is generally read by undergraduate philosophy students encountering Fichte for the first time, and few get beyond that. In his own time, Fichte was dismissed from his university post for political and religious failings.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

F.W.J. Schelling

G. W. F. Hegel

Schelling and Hegel were contemporaries, “GenY” to Fichte’s “GenX” if you will. They are both protestant, both from southwest Germany — an interesting part of the country, known for a certain independence of thinking that is not a commonplace German national characteristic (we don’t believe in “nationaler Eigentumlichkeiten” much these days, but they were taken for granted until, O, 60 years ago or so).

Both Schelling and Hegel are protestant. This is very important (and not a little odd, when you consider that some of the most convinced followers of German Idealism today seem to be Roman Catholic). Both studied at the university in Tübingen (along with the great Romantic poet, Hölderlin; Idealism and Romanticism walk hand in hand), in the protestant theology faculty. [Today, at least, there is Roman Catholic faculty as well; the two are housed in the same building, with wall down the middle. I do not know if the Tübingen theology faculty embraced both sides of the Reformation at that time, though I would not be surprised; a number of the noble families of Württemberg seem to have remained papist, while the rest of the folk were largely Lutheran.

Hegel is the biggest of these Big Names. He was the scariest of them all to the Establishment (Schelling, by contrast, was accepted as Orthodox, Right-thinking and generally pro-Establishment). He is also the one who has always excited young minds, and turned them toward philosophy. This was true in his own day (students took verbatim notes of Hegel’s lectures, and a lot of what survives as written-by-Hegel, is really reconstruction from such notes). It is true today; I have seen large classrooms filled to overflowing, with students spilling out into hallways — respectable doctoral students (well, perhaps not exactly respectable...) — sitting on the floor to get the latest word on Hegel’s philosophy. The Young Hegelians filled out the philosophical system. The St. Louis Hegelians, in the United States, elaborated an American version (and one of them built the Brooklyn Bridge; Hegelians still come to admire its perfect philosophical structure...). Karl Marx and his followers elaborate from it a whole new political philosophy (which is very probably inherent in the basic Hegelian thinking, and which rests entirely on Hegel’s notion of the historical unfolding of the Spirit in a dialectic).

[Interestingly, Hegel himself seems to have abandoned — or never to have been interested in — any sort of radical political thinking. His book, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, was puzzling to the young radical element when it appeared; its acceptance by an “orthodox” group, historically less significant than the Young Hegelians and Marxists, made that orthodoxy acceptable to the politically conservative Establishment that ran the entirely state-controlled universities, and to the hierarchies of both Protestant (especially, Lutheran) and Roman Catholic state churches that predominated until the end of the second decade of the 20^th century. That same line has been influential in conservative political thinking in the United States. It was the prevalent line of Continental thinking tolerated at Harvard University (not, of course, in the Philosophy Department, which was mired in Pragmatism and Anglo-American linguistic-analytic folly, but in the study of government and politics); it clearly drove the thinking of Henry Kissinger, and still lurks in the background of those who align themselves with that conservative politics.]

The great work of Hegel is The Phenomenology of the Spirit. It is not an easy book, and it is even worse at the beginning. The preface was written, so the story goes, overnight, since Hegel was late with the manuscript. He was clearly over-tired, and he clearly never edited. Add to this a tendency for the German language to allow over-long sentences, and the difficulty of German syntax (the general rule: Find the verb!), and the thing is just about unreadable. The rest of the book is far less awkward, as I recall.

Far more interesting, and infinitely more readable, in my view, is the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.

§ 1.Objects of Philosophy
§ 2.Reflective Thought
§ 3.The Content of Philosophy
§ 4.Popular Modes of Thought
§ 5.Reason
§ 6.All that is Rational is Real
§ 7.Beginning to Reflect
§ 8.Empirical Knowledge
§ 9.Speculative Logic
§ 10.The Critical Philosophy
§ 11.Conditions for the existence of Philosophy
§ 12.The Rise of Philosophy
§ 13.The History of Philosophy
§ 14.The System of Philosophy
§ 15.Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical Whole.
§ 16.The form of an Encyclopaedia
§ 17.How to Begin?
§ 18.Subdivision of philosophy into three Parts

This is the list of sections, in the introduction to part one of the Encyclopedia, sometimes called “The Encyclopedia Logic” or “The Shorter Logic” (to distinguish it from The Science of Logic, which is Hegel’s complete treatment of the subject).

This is very short — about the length of a 10-page typed-double-space manuscript. The paragraphs are short, the translation is felicitous and I think you should read it. Hit the hyperlinked first section, and you get the whole thing.

Far better to get the stuff right from the horse’s mouth, than from me at second-hand.

The key elements to note here: First, philosophy is never grounded in the same way as other sciences, in certain assumptions about how knowledge works. It begins in the critique of that — how is knowledge possible in the first place? This is the Cartesian starting point, and that of everyone since. Second, philosophy is systematic; it aims at a completed structure, from foundation principles, to uttermost inferences. This is a superb summary of the Rationalist line of thinking.

It is deemed completely absurd by quite a few folks, such as Schopenhauer (a very hard philosopher to read). He is attacked by many as politically authoritarian (possibly true, and certainly understood as such by some later thinkers who assimilate him to both authoritarian and totalitarian lines of thinking the 20^th century); he is defended by others (generally, by those who favor nice Biedermeier authoritarian regimes — Marxists, Leninists, proponents of Mao Tse Dong thought, and most Republicans in the U. S., if they are smart enough to read Hegel).

Positivism

Positivism arises in the mid-19^th century, and we need to look at it briefly. All Modern science, from 1850 on, roughly, is positivist. Edmund Leach, in his 1966 Henry Myers lectures, defines Positivism:

Positivism is the view that serious scientific inquiry should not search for ultimate causes deriving from some outside source but must confine itself to the study of relations existing between facts which are directly accessible to observation.

This is exactly the opposite of what Rationalist and Idealist philosophy has been claiming about scientific knowledge. It is the ultimate Empiricism. The problem that Hume notes, of cause and effect as the primary relationship, is not resolved nor dissolved — it is just ignored (except by some philosophers of science).

The great name associated with Positivism initially is that of Auguste Comte. His aim seems to have been mostly to develop a social science that paralleled the advances of natural science. He was not particularly successful. However, this is a very good label for what is accomplished for the first truly Modern social science that is a science as we understand that today, in the hands of John Stuart Mill.

Effectively, Mill (who was an accomplished Utilitarian moral philosopher, as well as the founder of scientific economics) says, that which in economics can be treated quantitatively and mathematically, can be considered “science”; the rest is philosophy. This is important because it distinguishes between philosophy and science (a very new idea), and it asserts the mathematical nature of science. Since quantification in economics (and social science generally) is a matter of ratios and of incremental change in statistical populations, the heart of the matter is the Calculus (and that is why you study calculus and statistics, if you do social science). Mill actually solves some of the ultimate-causes problems this way; mathematics is a well-founded system. But, while Mill is smart enough to get that, it is far from clear the average run of positivist natural- or social-scientist even gets it. And that can be a problem.

Logical-positivism, which aims at extending this inherent foundation, by looking at the larger logical issues that can be adumbrated from mathematical and quantitative approaches to science (mathematics, after all, is just a special case of a logical system), develops in Vienna, and is taken to England in the early 20^th century, where it eventually supplants British Idealism in the universities, and from there it spreads to the U. S., becoming increasingly identified as an Anglo-American school.

We have covered most of the stuff I need to cover in the history of how we got here, philosophically. In the next section, I will comment on developments in the 20^th century, which has led to some of us thinking Modernity has gone about as far as it can go, and is perhaps already past, with a view to asking, what is possible to “post-Modernity”?

You should be finishing your research for your long papers. You should have completed that reading in a week or so. You should then spend a week thinking and reviewing that material, then set about writing a few pages a day, over the ensuing week.