Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture

"I tend to agree with people like Pippin and Brandom that modernity is one of the biggest shifts in human civilization. It is, to put it crudely and focus on the philosophical dimension, the shift from grounding truth, politics and the self in tradition and religion, to the attempt to ground them in a self-standing form of reason. Roughly speaking, modernism is an attempt to say the subject has to agree to things in order for them to be true. So we can’t just take it as read that because it’s in the tradition, or because it’s come from religion, it must be true, and we can’t assume we have access to objective reality. We have to understand how we think about reality, too. “German idealism can be extraordinarily difficult and horrendous to read—yet it’s also the most important movement in philosophy ever, on par with the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece” Now, because that’s a very easy caricature, it’s easy to imagine some kind of completely self-sufficient, omniscient subject. But that’s not actually what the great modern philosophers like Kant and Hegel were describing. One of the aims of this book is to show that much of postmodern criticism of modern philosophy is attacking a straw man. That’s a very important message. It’s also the case that German idealism can be extraordinarily difficult, complicated and horrendous to read—Kant and Hagel especially—yet it’s also the most important movement in philosophy ever, on par with the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece. So for someone to give you a reliable guide through Kant and Hegel, and then the implications of their thought for Nietzsche and Heidegger, is a really useful thing. This book does that, and it’s very good at not overwhelming you with detail, but just saying, ‘Look, here are the big issues; here’s the kind of general map of what’s going on.’ German idealism is a philosophical movement that begins with Kant and then moves through Fichte and Hegel and Schelling. (Those are the big four at the start, and we’re still dealing with the aftermath of them now.) Basically, it’s an engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy, which argues that in a sense everything passes through the subject. Kant’s critical philosophy, his ‘Copernican Turn’, is to posit that when it comes to knowledge of the external world, rather than trying to get our ideas to correspond with what’s out there, we find that objects correspond with our ideas. Our minds contribute to our understanding of the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So the categories of causation—of unity, plurality, multiplicity, things like that—are actually categories of our mind, and the only way that we could ever have an experience of anything is if our minds contribute those categories. Even space and time come from our minds, according to Kant. You can make a similar case with morality, where you say in order to be autonomous, the subject has to give the law to himself, rather than just receive it from some other source outside of himself. That is the modern revolution. German idealism is trying to understand how we can we make this work. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are not entirely happy with the way Kant achieves this, but they are agreed that he’s hit on a genuine problem."