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German Philosophy Today: Between Idealism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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In his essay On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, of 1834, Heinrich Heine suggested to his French audience that the German propensity for ‘metaphysical abstractions’ had led many people to condemn philosophy for its failure to have a practical effect, Germany having only had its revolution in thought, while France had its in reality. Heine, albeit somewhat ironically, refuses to join those who condemn philosophy: ‘German philosophy is an important matter, which concerns the whole of humanity, and only the last grandchildren will be able to judge whether we should be blamed or praised for working out our philosophy before our revolution.’ He then makes the following prognosis:
the German revolution will not be more mild and more gentle because it was preceded by Kantian critique, Fichtean transcendental idealism and even philosophy of nature. Revolutionary forces have developed via these doctrines which are just waiting for the day when they can break out and fill the world with horror and admiration. … Don't smile at my advice, the advice of a dreamer who warns you about Kantians, Fichteans and philosophers of nature. Don't smile at the fantast who expects the same revolution in the realm of appearance as took place in the realm of spirit. … A play will be performed in Germany in comparison with which the French Revolution could appear just as a harmless idyll (ibid., pp. 616–17).
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References
1 Heine, Heinrich, Sämtliche Werke in Drei Bändern (Essen: Phaidon, n.d.) pp. 615–16Google Scholar.
2 It should not be forgotten, though, how much the development of West German democracy owes to the opening up of certain aspects of political debate by the anti-authoritarian ideas of the Student Movement.
3 Henrich, Dieter, Nach dent Ende der Teilung. über Identitdten und Intellektualitdt in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 203Google Scholar.
4 For the reflective response to post-structuralism, see Frank, Manfred, Was Ist Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984)Google Scholar / What is Neostructuralism?, trans. Wilke, Sabine, Gray, Richard, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)Google Scholar; for Habermas' less sensitive response, see Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985)Google Scholar/ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)Google Scholar; for a differentiated recent view see Welsch, Wolfgang, Vemunft. Die zeitgenossiche Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vemunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 What would tend to differ is the number of philosophers happy to work in relation both to the German and the analytical traditions, such as Rödiger Bubner, Wolfram Hogrebe, Albrecht Wellmer and some of the philosophers discussed below.
6 My most glaring omission is that I do not discuss the work of Gadamer, who relies almost exclusively on the tradition I am considering, in any detail. Gadamer's influence has been so widespread that it is not feasible to give an adequate account of it here: it has been well documented in English anyway. As will soon become apparent, my main theme is essentially a version of what is expressed by the title of Gadamer's Truth and Method, though my development of that theme is quite different from Gadamer's.
7 Heidegger, Martin, Zur Sache des Denkens (Töbingen: Niemeyer, 1988) p. 63Google Scholar.
8 See Bowie, Andrew, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Rethinking the History of the Subject: Jacobi, Schelling and Heidegger’, ed. Critchley, Simon and Dews, Peter, Deconstructive Subjectivities (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 105–26Google Scholar.
9 Scholz, Heinrich, ed., Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1916), p. 52Google Scholar.The idea of inverting the cogito, which is still too often credited to Kierkegaard (who got it from Schelling, who got it from Jacobi), would seem to stem from J. G. Hamann, who proposed it in a letter to Jacobi in 1785: see Frank, Manfred ‘Unendliche Anndherung’. Die Anfdnge der philosophischen Fruhromantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 676Google Scholar.
10 See Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar, and ‘Romanticism and Technology’ in Radical Philosophy 72, 1995 pp. 5–16. Jacobi presents his arguments in the name of theology, but their effects went well beyond theology. Jacobi was, incidentally, a significant philosophical influence on Holderlin.
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14 See Henrich, Nach dem Ende der Teilung, p. 1993. The other alternative here is the stultifying historicism exemplified by Frederick Beiser and some German researchers, which, for all its valuable contributions to knowledge of the history of philosophy, rigidly restricts the arguments of the past to their contexts of emergence. Beiser bizarrely thinks one should investigate the history of philosophy in this manner because revelation of the potential of past arguments for the present will supposedly be unlikely to be valid for more than a few years. Despite Beiser's claims to the contrary, this really is Ranke's view of history from what turns out to be the point of view of eternity (see Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 34, Autumn/Winter 1996).
15 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus ein Gesprach (Breslau: Gottl. Löwe, 1787), p. 224Google Scholar.
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19 See Pippin, Robert B., ‘Avoiding German Idealism’, in Idealism as Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 129–53Google Scholar, and the arguments below.
20 See Bowie, Andrew, ‘John McDowell's Mind and World, and Early Romantic Epistemology’, Revue Internationale de philosophie, 50, (197)3/1996, pp. 515–54Google Scholar, which questions McDowell's version of the question via his failure to consider the issue of schematism as it appears in the tradition from Kant to Heidegger.
21 Frank terms this position ‘Produktionsidealismus’. Jacobi and others argued that this was essentially a version of Spinozism, in which the substance was re-named as the absolute I (see Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, chapter 1).
22 Schnädelbach, Herbert, Vernunft und Geschichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 159–61Google Scholar.
23 Fichte himself eventually renounced this faith.
24 On the stages of Schilling's philosophy, see Bowie, Schelling. Heidegger owes much to these ideas, as is apparent in Heidegger, Martin, Schellings Abhandlung Uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1971)Google Scholar.
25 This conception of Dionysus derives, without acknowledgement, from Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling.
26 Habermas, Jiirgen, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 160Google Scholar /Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. Hohengarten, William Mark, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1992)Google Scholar. On the link between Schelling, Nietzsche and Derrida (and Rorty), see Bowie, Schelling, chapter 4.
27 Hartmann offers a ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel in ed. Maclntyre, A., Hegel. A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972) p. 101–24Google Scholar
28 This does not mean that I think Hegel or his successors would subscribe for a moment to this materialist conception, just that the structures in question are notably similar, because they rely on one side reflecting to the other what it really is.
29 See Henrich, Dieter, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971)Google Scholar for the classic account of the problem with Hegel's ‘logic of reflection’, where this problem becomes apparent.
30 See ed. and trans. Bowie, Andrew, F. W. J von Schelling: ‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ (Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Frank, Der unendliche Mangel; Bowie, Schelling, ‘The Actuality of Schelling's Hegel-Critique’, in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britian 21–2, 1990, pp. 19–29, ‘The Schellingian Alternative’ in ‘Symposium on Bowie: Schelling contra Hegel’ issue of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 30, Autumn/winter 1994, pp. 23–42, and ‘John McDowell's Mind and World’.
31 This follows from Kant's argument against the ontological proof, that ‘being is not a real predicate’: Hegel, one should remember, defends the ontological proof.
32 As Schnädelbach has suggested, the term is unfortunate: he suggests ‘post-idealist’, though even that also involves problems, given the unresolved disputes over the notion of ‘realism’.
33 E.g., Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975)Google Scholar /Traditional and Analytical Philosophy, trans. Gorner, P.A. (Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, Selbstbewuβtsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt MA: Suhrkamp, 1979)Google Scholar /Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Stern, Paul, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992)Google Scholar.
34 E.g., Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973)Google Scholar. Apel was also important for his introduction of the work of C. S. Peirce into the German debate: See Apel, K. O, Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975)Google Scholar.
35 I take Schleiermacher as the central figure because, unlike Hamann, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt and the other Romantics, he was already fully aware of all the dimensions of language - i.e., the semiotic, the semantic, the pragmatic and the ‘world-disclosive’ - which have become central to contemporary philosophical debate.
36 Novalis, . Band 2 Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Mähl, Hans-Joachim, (Munich Vienna: Hanser, 1978), p. 100.Google Scholar
37 Canfield, John V., ed., Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 35Google Scholar.
38 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Frank, Manfred, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 106Google Scholar. By the time this essay appears there will be an English translation and edition by Andrew Bowie of Hermeneutik und Kritik, in ‘Hermeneutics and Criticism’ and Other Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
39 See Bowie, Andrew, ‘The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy’, in ed. O'Hear, A., ‘Verstehen’ and Humane Understanding, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 121–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 These moves are in fact generally associated with a suspicion of Kant, and are historically linked to Jacobi and the Romantics in ways which have yet to be explored in detail: see Coffa, J. Alberto, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap (Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Bowie, ‘The Romantic Connection: Neurath, the Frankfurt School, and Heidegger’ (forthcoming).
41 Schlegel, Friedrich, Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1828) (Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe vol. 18) (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1963) p. 518.Google Scholar
42 Neurath, Otto, Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften. Band 2 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981), p. 924.Google Scholar
43 Putnam, Hilary, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA, London, 1989), p. 120.Google Scholar
44 Fodor, Jerry, cited in Malpas, J. E., Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 65.Google Scholar
45 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., Dialektik (1814–15). Einleitung zur Dialektik (1833) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988), p. 39Google Scholar. Tugendhat makes this point very clear in Einfuhrung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie.
46 As I show in ‘John McDowell's Mind and World’, the key issue here is the adoption of Kant's notion of schematism, which is intended as the bridge between spontaneity and receptivity, for the theory of language.
47 The same point was repeatedly made by Friedrich Schlegel in the 1790s, and by Novalis.
48 See Hiley, David, Bohman, James, and Shusterman, Richard, eds., The Interpretive Turn (Cornell University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
49 He gives an excellent summary of his interpretation of the linguistic turn in Habermas, , Faktizitdt und Geltung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 24–45Google Scholar/Between Facts and Norms, trans. Rehg, W. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).Google Scholar
50 Habermas, JÜrgen, Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 33Google Scholar. The point is, incidentally, much the same as that made by Derrida against Husserl's conception of the transcendental subject in La voix et le phénomène.
51 As I suggest in From Romanticism to Critical Theory, chapter 5, the ethical dimension was also central, albeit in a somewhat different manner, to Schleiermacher.
52 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, T.W., Dialektik der Aufklärung.Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), pp. 3–5Google Scholar.
53 Unlike Heidegger, though, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment still intended to contribute to new forms of rationality, not just to claim it was inherently bound to domination. Adorno later developed a conception not always so far from that of Habermas: see Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, chapter 9. Habermas tends to concentrate too exclusively on Adorno's claims that only radical modern art, such as the work of Kafka, Beckett or Schönberg, can retain a sense of what a new rationality would be, via its resistance to existing ways of making sense in modernity. Adorno's Negative Dialectics, though, offers more interesting perspectives for a workable theory of critical rationality than Habermas' account would suggest: see, e.g., Schnädelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte.
54 Gadamer himself adopts such metaphors from the later Heidegger: cf. his remark that ‘The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and persists, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it, but the work of art itself’ (Gadamer, , Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen:J. C. B. Mohr, 1975, p. 98Google Scholar/Truth and Method, revised translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Seabury Press, 1989)), which suggests the reification which recurs in his thought. Gadamer is insistent, like Hegel in his account of ‘Sittlichkeit’, that we can never free ourselves of ‘prejudices’ in whose genesis we play no role and to which we are subject by the very fact of being in a social world at all.
55 Schnädelbach, Herbert, Zur Rehabilitierung des animal rationale (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), p. 289Google Scholar
56 Heidegger, Martin, Unterwegs zur Sprache, (Pfullingen: Neske 1959), pp. 32–3.Google Scholar
57 A suggestion first made by Hamann in 1784: see Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester University Press, 1993) chapter 6.Google Scholar
58 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Ethik (1812–13), (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990) p. 66.Google Scholar
59 Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973),Google ScholarKnowledge and Human Interests, trans. Shapiro, J. J. (London: Heinemann, 1978).Google Scholar
60 See Frank, Manfred, Stil in der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Reclam 1992)Google Scholar, ‘Wider den apriorischen Intersubjektivismus’, ed. Brumlik, MichaBrunkhorst, Hauke, Gemeinschaft und Gerechtigkeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993), pp. 273–89Google Scholar, and The Subject and the Text. Essays in Literary Theory and Philosophy, ed. Bowie, Andrew, (Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
61 For more detail on the debate see Dews', Peter outstanding account in The Limits of Disenchantment (London, New York: Verso, 1995)Google Scholar, chapter 8. The main texts are Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken; Tugendhat, Selbstbewuβitsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979);Google ScholarHenrich, , Konzepte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987)Google Scholar, ‘Noch einmal in Zirkeln. Eine Kritik von Ernst Tugendhats semantischer Erklörung von SelbstbewuBtsein’, ed. Bellut, Clemens and Mϋller-Scholl, Ulrich, Mensch und Moderne (Wϋirzburg: KÖnigshausen und Neumann, 1989), pp. 93–102Google Scholar; and Frank, , ‘Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität’, in Selbstbewuβitsein und Selbsterkenntnis (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), pp. 410–77Google Scholar.
62 The positions of Habermas and Tugendhat differ in certain respects, which would require some complex differentiations. All that concerns me here is the way in which they both rely on semantic premises for their arguments about self-consciousness, and share the same crucial fault.
63 This is in fact a version of Strawson's arguments about personhood, in which my identity is established via the means for discriminating a spatio- temporal object.
64 Henrich, unlike Frank, would not directly associate himself with early Romantic philosophy, preferring to see HÖlderlin as the key figure, and he still thinks that it may be possible to work out a viable version of Hegelianism. Despite this, I would maintain that the Romantics are very close indeed to the ideas Henrich outlines in Fluchtlinien and elsewhere.
65 See Frank, , Selbstbewuβitsein und Selbsterkenntnis, and his demonstration in ‘Unendliche Anndherung’, pp. 804–6,Google Scholar that Novalis, via Fichte's account of the genesis of intersubjectivity in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, already identified the reification which renders the semantic model of self-consciousness unworkable. In Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994)Google Scholar /The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)Google Scholar Habermas' successor in Frankfurt, Axel Honneth, does not, despite his many insights into the problem of intersubjective recognition in social philosophy, even consider the problem at issue here.
66 If to ‘know’ is to identify by classifying with a predicate, this kind of ‘knowledge’ cannot, strictly, be termed knowledge. What Frank is pointing to are facts like my certainty of having an indeterminate feeling of malaise before I come to know - assent to the proposition that - I am clinically depressed.
67 Rorty, Richard, Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers Volume Two (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
68 In Die Grenzen der Verstdndigung. Ein Geistergesprdch zwischen Lyotard und Habermas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988)Google Scholar Frank expressly adopts key aspects of Habermas' theory against Lyotard.
69 Tugendhat studied with Heidegger early in his career before turning to analytical philosophy.
70 See Andrew Bowie, ‘Adorno, Heidegger and the Meaning of Music’, in Thesis 11 (forthcoming). It is notable, of course, how important music is for the later Wittgenstein.
71 Jacobi, F. H., Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrm Moses Mendelssohn (Breslan: Loewe, 1789), p. 420Google Scholar.
72 Friedrich Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed. Odebrecht, R., (Leipzig, 1942), pp. 274–5Google Scholar. ‘transcendent basis’ is where Schleiermacher locates God, but this does not affect the philosophical point: he arrived at this position not least via his engagement with Jacobi.
73 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. Lommatzch, Carl, (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1974), p. 76Google Scholar.
74 Adorno, T. W., Probleme der Moralphilosopie (1963) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 154–5Google Scholar.
75 Jürgen Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft (Zurich: Pendo, 1991), p. 125Google Scholar, quoted in Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment, p. 165. It should be remembered that Habermas wrote his Ph.D. on Schelling.
76 Habermas, Jürgen, Texte und Kontexte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991) p. 90Google Scholar.
77 This is most obvious in evolutionary theories, which have to explain themselves as the result of evolutionary adaptation. See Bowie, Schelling, chapter 2. This does not make such theories false, but it does mean they cannot be self-grounding.
78 Habermas, Jürgen, Moralbewuβtsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 26Google Scholar/ Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhardt, C. and Weber, S. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
79 This aspect of Kant is what led Schelling and Schleiermacher to see ‘schematism’, which links spontaneity and receptivity, as the basis of the ability to use a finite number of relatively fixed signifiers for an infinite number of ways of articulating the world. See Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, chapter 2.
80 Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. B66Google Scholar.This issue is excellently dealt with in Welsch, Vernunft, pp. 490–5.
81 Schleiermacher is also aware of the principle danger of a consensus theory, as he makes clear in the assertion that ‘even incorrect thought can become common to all’ (Ibid., p. 374). On the problems with the concept of semantic symmetry, see Frank, Manfred, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualitdt. Reflexionen üSubjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlaβihrer ‘postmodernen’ Toterkldrung, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)Google Scholar.
82 Putnam, Hilary, Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 See, e.g., Fleck, Ludwik, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wtssenschaftlichen Tatsache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980)Google Scholar.
84 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, Le differend (Paris: Minuit, 1983)Google Scholar stylises this question into a completely implausible theory of the incommensurability of kinds of discourse. My claim is that Habermas' version of the division of the spheres intensifies the problems inherent in any fundamental disagreement, which are actually better negotiable if one does not attempt to divide spheres of validity from the outset. On this issue, See also Frank, Manfred, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. Studien Zur deutsch-französischen Hermeneutik und Texttheorie, Erweiterte Neuausgabe, (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 590–607Google Scholar.
85 Heidegger would not have seen it in these terms, but see Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory for the demonstration of the continuity of Romantic ideas with the workable aspects of Heidegger.
86 Tugendhat, Ernst, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tugendhat argues for a radical difference between the world-disclosure inherent in any kind of meaning and the notion of a claim to validity that can be responded to negatively or positively by its recipient.
87 Habermas, Jürgen, Vorstudien und Erganzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 129Google Scholar
88 As Wolfram Hogrebe notes in Ahnung und Erkenntnis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 29Google Scholar, the concept of ‘Stellungnahme’ is a metaphor, and the status of ‘taking up a position’ in this manner ‘is ontologically no less problematic than representations and intentions’ which Tugendhat and Habermas try to obviate with the metaphor. Where is the ‘position’ in question actually located?
89 Putnam, Hilary, Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 64Google Scholar.
90 This is, I presume, why Davidson thinks truth is indefinable, and assumes an ‘intuitive grasp we have of the concept’ (Davidson, Donald, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press 1984), p. 267)Google Scholar.
91 Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett 1978), pp. 18–21Google Scholar. I am not concerned here with the validity of the rest of Goodman's position.
92 See Bowie, Andrew, ‘Non-Identity: The German Romantics, Schelling and Adorno’, in ed. Rajan, T., Clark, D., Intersections: Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 243–60Google Scholar.
93 There are sometimes elements of the received picture in Novalis (and Schlegel), but the real direction of their thought is the one I have outlined. Much of the received picture depends anyway on misinterpretation of the Romantics' use of key terms like ‘feeling’, and ‘longing’, which generally have quite strict epistemological meanings.