German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 Book

Who amongst us does not like reading about German Idealism? I know I do. The issues discussed in this most highly readable book get at the current foundational dilemmas floating around the hardest of the hard sciences, physics. Is the truth out there, or is it in us, or are our labels we attach to the world a convenience for imposing order within a world that just is? Or in modern language, do we justify true beliefs because we comport are experiences to reality, or embrace it through coherence, or proceed because we are pragmatist?

The characters in this book from Kant to before Hegel wrestle with all three methods and appreciate the problems lurking amongst us such that ultimately they want to know if the knowledge that I have about the world is the same as the knowledge the world reveals to itself through itself or using the Hegel term 'absolute knowledge'.

Thomas Aquinas (oddly, I don't think he is mentioned once in this book) 'proves' God through reason by considering the effects that we observe. The experiences and things St. Aquinas sees give him the analogical legerdemain he desires (as always, I recommend the 800 page book of his Selected Writings). Physicists see a spin of an electron and label it 'up' or 'down' but only really see how the electron will behave in a magnetic field. Their equations work, predict and explain what they see, but it's a label that works but they don't know what its essence is. They have epistemological understanding and use the label they put on the phenomena and do science correctly to the 10th decimal place. All the while, they know there is a 'measurement problem' (double slit, Copenhagen Interpretation, particles/wave, all are different ways of saying the second law of the 'laws of thought' is violated since mutual exclusive gets smeared). [Obviously, I think St. Aquinas is on the wrong track, but I only mention him to show how modern science thinks the same way!, and this book will enlighten the modern reader to that].

What are we capable of knowing about the world and what are the pieces that make up the world? Being is seeing, or is it seeing is being, or neither, or both? The ontological ('being') gets at the essence of the entity, the epistemological gets at appearance of the phenomena. It's not necessary in order to do science but it will add to a further explication of 'the truth is out there', if we can only understand the elusive nature of things. 'Shut up and calculate' works but it means the foundations are sublated by the emergent phenomena. (Fichte leads to Husserl who leads to Sartre turning phenomenology to Existentialism, the book will comment on the connections, oh and by the way I would strongly recommend Husserl's Ideas, he's a Kantian except when he's not).

Why is there something rather than nothing? A variation of that question lingers through all of philosophy. Sometimes the question get posed as is their freewill, or is the world an illusion or are appearances different from reality, or other such variations. Labels, labels, labels, we put on labels through our words on the identity of the identity of an identity when faced with dilemmas that lead to 'irony which is always jealous of authenticity' (a Kierkegaard quote, btw), and we reify the label such that we lose sight of the real question we were seeking 'why is there something rather nothing'? The forgotten German Idealist in this book understood this problem.

The interplay between the thinkers featured in this book step you through Kant's universal, necessary and certain world of absolute knowledge with a thing-in-itself where intuition, space and time are apriori synthetic justified true beliefs and such that Newton must be right up to just before Hegel who will merge the subjective with the objective allowing for finite humans to have absolute knowledge.

This book shows how some very smart thinkers (mostly ignored today) gets at what are still relevant questions today for what are the 'nature of things' (BTW, my favorite book is Lucretius' book On the Nature of Things). German Idealism from 1787 to 1804 is well worth learning for all students of reality.

[As a bracketed aside: I would recommend the Bernstein Tapes on Kant's first critique, Spinoza's Ethics (truly a superior book!), and Berkley's Three Dialouges as prep for reading this book, and Leibnitz's easily digestible Monodology since particularly in the Kant section the author compares and contrast him with Kant, and in addition, I will definitely put some Schelling in my future reading list!].