Abstract
This chapter explores the reception of Kant’s understanding of consciousness by both romantics and idealists from 1785 to 1799, tracing its impact on the theory of religion. Kant’s understanding of consciousness as developed in the first Critique is analyzed, and two fundamental strategies in the reception of Kant regarding his understanding of consciousness and its relation to the Absolute are examined. The first is that of the early German Romantics: Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Hölderlin, for whom the Absolute exceeds all possibility of conceptualization. The second is that of the German idealists: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, for whom the logic that makes possibility intelligible precedes actuality and thereby conditions the ground of Being itself. Lastly, the development of the first strategy by Friedrich Schleiermacher is explored.
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Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper, 1958), 31. This is a translation of the 1821 (third edition) of the Speeches. However, for the most part, this essay will focus on the first (1799) edition of the Speeches, Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, ed./trans., Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 1996). Henceforth, each edition will be indicated by the name of the translator.
- 2.
Speeches (third edition, Oman translation) p. 216; first edition (Crouter translation), 99.
- 3.
Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed., Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 93; cf., 73.
- 4.
Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, ed./trans., Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 26. Cf. Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64.
- 5.
Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 55–75.
- 6.
I discuss Kant’s understanding of consciousness in significant depth in “Transcendental Arguments for Personal Identity in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Philo, 14 no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2011): 109–135.
- 7.
For a more in-depth discussion of this point, see my “Where Have all the Monads Gone? Substance and Transcendental Freedom in Schleiermacher,” Journal of Religion, Volume 95, No. 4 (October 2015): 477–505, especially 498–499.
- 8.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed./trans., Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). All references to Kant’s first Critique are to this translation; page references to the Academy edition pagination follow the citation.
- 9.
So Reinhold, “in consciousness, the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and the object and relates the representation to both.” Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Contributions Toward Correcting the Previous Misunderstandings of Philosophers, Vol. I (1790) 167; cited from Dan Breazeale’s article “Karl Leonhard Reinhold” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For an excellent discussion of Reinhold, see Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, 81–160.
- 10.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett: 1987), 44–45. While the book appeared in 1800, it was a defense and popularization of Fichte’s already published views. For an up-to-date and accessible account of Fichte’s views, see Allen W. Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as the discussion by Ameriks in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, op. cit., 187–264.
- 11.
On this point, see George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77.
- 12.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel, Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 277.
- 13.
Jacobi, On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1789), 42; cited in Frank, 70.
- 14.
Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, trans., Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 294.
- 15.
On these points, see Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 63.
- 16.
Cited in Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 64.
- 17.
On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1789) 420, note; cited in Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 64; Giovanni, Jacobi, 374.
- 18.
On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1789) 215f.; cited in Frank, 204.
- 19.
On the Doctrine of Spinoza (1789) 423, Giovanni, Jacobi, 375.
- 20.
On the Doctrine of Spinoza 427; Giovanni Jacobi, 376.
- 21.
On this point, see Giovanni, Freedom and Religion, 85–86, and Frank 68.
- 22.
The centrality of Jacobi’s influences on Romanticism is documented by Frank in his chapter “The Unknowability of the Absolute,” in Philosophical Foundations, 55–75.
- 23.
Giovanni, Jacobi, 509.
- 24.
Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 125.
- 25.
Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 97.
- 26.
On this point, see Henrich, “Hölderlin on Judgment and Being,” 71–89, in Henrich, The Course of Remembrance.
- 27.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgart: 1943–1985, Bd. 4, 216f. All translations of Hölderlin’s fragment are my own.
- 28.
Cited in Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 34.
- 29.
Cited in Frank, Philosophical Foundations, op. cit., 89.
- 30.
Hölderlin, SW, 4. 216, translation mine.
- 31.
Novalis: Schriften, Vol. II, ed., Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohnhammer, 1960 ff.), 412, Nr. 1. An English translation can be found in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans./ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 23.
- 32.
An English translation can be found in Novalis: Fichte Studies, trans./ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123. On this point, see also Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 172ff.
- 33.
Friedrich von Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1958 ff.), KFSA 12, 328.
- 34.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1814–15), Einleitung zur Dialektik (1833), ed. Andreas Arndt, Philosophische Bibliothek. Vol. 335 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), 105.
- 35.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, KGA, II.10.2, 568.
- 36.
On this point, as well as a discussion of the differences between Schleiermacher and Jacobi, see Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77–80.
- 37.
Crouter, 22.
- 38.
Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972–) (hereafter KGA, cited parenthetically in the text by division, volume, and page number).
- 39.
For further discussion of these points, see my “Metaphysical Realism and Epistemological Modesty in Schleiermacher’s Method,” in The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, ed. Chris Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
- 40.
Cited in Crouter, Between Enlightenment and Romanticism, 88.
- 41.
Life of Schleiermacher, ed./trans. Federica Rowan (London: Smith Elder and Co., 1860), I: 283–284.
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Mariña, J. (2020). Religion and Early German Romanticism. In: Millán Brusslan, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53567-4_5
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