RECONSTRUCTING GERMAN IDEALISM AND ROMANTICISM: HISTORICISM AND PRESENTISM

Extract

Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002)

All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente

When two major studies on the same thematic appear roughly simultaneously, integrating not only their authors' respective careers but the revisions of a whole generation of scholarship, the moment cries out for stock-taking, both substantively and methodologically. At a minimum, we need to recognize the key theses of our two protagonists and the frameworks they erect to uphold them. But we need even more to step back from that endeavor to wider considerations. I advance two claims in that light. First, something has been unearthed in these studies which speaks to urgent philosophical concerns of our day, namely the rise of naturalized epistemology and the need for a more encompassing naturalism. Indeed, I suspect this current interest may have incited (if only subliminally) discernment of just those aspects of the earlier age. That signals something essential about the point and practice of intellectual history, namely (my second claim) the mutuality, not opposition, of historicism and presentism.